Читать книгу Spirit Walk - Jay Treiber - Страница 13

Six

The old Douglas Library had changed little, and Kevin was glad for it. Masoned of reclaimed government brick in 1906, the structure resembled the one-room schoolhouses of its time. Inside was cavernous and ramshackle and the rafters creaked with any kind of wind. Susan Marline Murray, great-granddaughter of the place’s original librarian, had come back from her big city library post to reclaim a legacy and head the place that, in the interim decades, had idled into disrepair. For the last eight years, Murray had waged an all-but-private battle to thwart the many efforts to modernize and upgrade, some to even raze the place and put up a stucco modular. So when Kevin walked in the door that afternoon, inventory stood at some ten-thousand books, periodicals, and magazines, four microfilm scanners, and two eight-year-old computers.

Examining the stacks and leafing through magazines no more sophisticated than Time and Newsweek, Kevin had procrastinated an hour before he went to the microfilm. It wasn’t a matter of locating the thing—he knew exactly the date it was published. He scanned the edition from the November eleventh, then the thirteenth. The font in the title head of The Douglas Dispatch hadn’t changed in thirty years. Xavier Zaragoza, a local whom Kevin had known all his life, had been head reporter for thirty-five years, and his articles tended to worry over local issues of the time, school-funding crises, labor strikes at Phelps Dodge, that the state Department of Corrections had slated a prison to be built in the area within a few years.

Kevin found a tactile comfort in the mechanics of old-fashioned devices. He turned the film crank at a measured speed. Images from his youth, some of them faces of those long dead, conveyed past the screen like specters in a dream. And, finally, the front page from the November thirteenth issue, as if of its volition, slowed to a stop before his eyes. The top read The Douglas Daily Dispatch. The lead story was just below, but he could not will his brain to cipher the words in the headline.

The clicks of a woman’s plastic heels turned him from the screen and he found Susan Murray, her hands politely coupled, standing at a safe distance behind him. A slim, handsome woman just shy of forty, clad in a sweater and jeans, she didn’t look anything like a typical librarian.

She nodded at the scanner. “You like antiques,” she said.

“I do,” Kevin allowed.

“You’re Kevin, aren’t you.” She ventured two steps and put forth her hand. He took it and smiled at her.

“I’m surprised you remember me.” Kevin had known Susan when she was a teenager, a passing friend of his youngest sister’s, a bright, spirited girl with wild blond hair. He pointed at his own head. “Dyed it gray.”

Susan ran her fingers down a length of her hair, now a deep, natural auburn, touched at the edges with strands of a lighter color. “Dyed mine brown.”

They chuckled, a bit uneasily. Susan gestured at the stacks. “Once more to the books, I see.”

Kevin smiled. “Never left them.”

“Well, then, that makes us kindred spirits, doesn’t it?” She tipped her chin at the scanner. “Copies are a dime a page.”

Kevin gave his head a jerk, “Steep,” he joked. Copies in big cities were at least fifty cents.

Susan folded her arms across her chest, nodded toward the dim light on the screen. “Find what you were after?”

Kevin glanced back at the monitor, careful not to read any of the words there. “I hope so. Part of it, maybe.”

He stepped onto the front porch of the Gilberts’ house on 9th street just after 6:00 p.m. and was thankful when Olivia Hallot answered the door and took the bottle of Merlot from his hand and welcomed him inside. His mother and sister, Tracy, had not yet arrived. He’d put on his least faded pair of blue jeans and sported a crisply new ivory-colored shirt, wanting for all the world to look his best for his mother and sister, neither of whom he had seen since the blowup two years before.

“You bring me back,” Patty Gilbert was telling him. Kevin was on the couch and Patty sat curled in the love seat across from him. Approaching seventy years old, she wore a flower-print dress rife with tiger lilies. She was working on her second glass of wine and waxing sentimental. “You and Johnny used to cut up so when you guys were together. Something about you two was a recipe for trouble.”

Kevin nodded. “J and I made some mischief.”

“Funny,” Patty said, smiling, “it wasn’t so cute back then.”

“Little distance softens things.” Kevin felt his face darken at the glib remark and was grateful when Jack Gilbert stepped into the room and handed him a scotch. He and John Jr. had been buddies since childhood and through high school, one of those friendships in which the parties meet again in adulthood only to discover they’d all along had little in common. John Jr. now ran the sand and gravel company which the Gilberts had bought from Kevin’s father almost twenty years before. The business had made a comfortable living for the McNallys in the Douglas area, but the Gilberts had expanded the company with outlets in most major cities in the state. Johnny now lived in Scottsdale and was by most standards quite well off.

Kevin’s father had sold the company for a reasonable amount, though Kevin couldn’t recall exactly how much—well over a million dollars. At the time Thomas had unloaded it, Kevin was certainly of an age he could have competently picked up the mantle, but the old man had long realized his son seemed slated for something other than managing which diesel-belching trucks delivered what tons of mixed concrete to which addresses. By the age of thirty-five—the business having been sold, inherited bonds matured, and stocks peaking—Kevin could have quit teaching and lived reasonably well—like Hemingway, he might have written books while living on family money. But Dr. McNally had long since come to terms with his lack of talent in such things; his place was before the chalkboard espousing the work of others.

Tracy McNally, this evening, made as much eye contact with her brother as possible. Kevin sensed she wanted the old closeness they had felt as kids. They had spent many hours over the phone when he and Janice had divorced, and when Kevin finally told her there was someone new in his life, Tracy was surprised it had taken so long.

They sat now at the Gilbert’s dining room table, chatting amiably. “That’s great, Trace,” Kevin said to her. She had been telling him about her recent move to Silver City, New Mexico, and the excellent middle school where she taught social studies. “I’m glad things have worked out so well for you.”

Tracy remarked that Kevin had come to look more and more like their father as he aged, the shadow of Thomas McNally whispered into the features and expressions of his son’s face. Her throat tightened and her eyes loaded more than once during their conversation. Their mother sat with Patty on the loveseat across from them, and though she’d chimed in once in a while, she allowed the siblings their long-needed talk. Olivia and John Sr. clattered about in the kitchen. Not once did any of them bring up the subject which had, when last they met, run their visit aground and ended in such bitter argument.

Two hours later, having finished dinner, Teresa touched on the sore subject. “Kevin, I’m bringing one of your poems to read on Tuesday.” For several beats, none of them spoke. No one all evening had brought up Tuesday’s trip to the Peloncillos.

“Oh great.”

“You gave it to me,” Teresa said, more intrepid now that the subject had been broached. “I figure I own it and can do whatever I want with it.”

“Most of my creative work is pretty crappy.”

“You always say that about your poetry.”

“And it’s the truth. It’s all crap.”

“No me puedes decir lo que pienso,” Teresa said.

“Piensa lo que quieras,” Kevin came back.

“Okay,” Tracy interrupted, holding up both hands. “This quits here. We’re not going to end this like last time. No Spanish, either.” Though both Tracy and their younger sister, Linda, understood Spanish, neither one was comfortable speaking it.

Kevin found himself up and in the kitchen unscrewing the cap on the bottle of Johnny Walker. John Gilbert was fumbling about as though to clean up, obviously uncomfortable with where the conversation had gone. “I’m sorry,” Kevin said, pointing at the bottle of scotch in his hand. “I shouldn’t just help myself.”

“Oh,” John said with a wave of his hand. “It’s perfectly all right. Go right ahead.”

When Kevin reentered the dining room, Olivia and Patty had fled the tension at the table and now sat in the living room. His mother and sister were whispering vehemently at each other in an attempt to keep from breaking into an all-out shouting match. They stopped as soon as they saw him. Kevin sat back down, both women staring at him.

“Kev,” Tracy said. “Going up there is the reason we’re all here. It just feels weird to avoid talking about it.”

“Look Kevin,” his mother broke in, impatient with the kid gloves. “For over thirty years you’ve pretended like this thing never happened.”

Angry, Kevin made to stand, but Tracy put her hand on his shoulder. “Kevin, settle down.” She looked at Teresa. “Mother, please.”

“I’m just saying, Kevin,” Teresa persisted. “We need to come together. To acknowledge and talk about this thing—those we lost.”

“Mother,” Kevin said, no longer conscious of the volume of his voice. “You think I haven’t obsessed over this?”

“We all have,” Teresa said.

Kevin killed his drink, at least a double, the bits of residual ice already melted. “You don’t think I’ve owned those deaths the last three decades?” John Gilbert, gentleman that he was, put another scotch at Kevin’s elbow.

“There’s the problem,” Teresa said. “You blame yourself when it wasn’t your fault.”

“Like hell it wasn’t.”

Teresa, rather dramatically, swept her arm to indicate everything around them. “What do you think this is?” she asked. “A Hollywood set, where the hero always rises to the occasion?”

“You know better than that,” Kevin said. “You couldn’t know what I’ve gone through.”

“Yes I could,” Teresa said. “Remember, I was there, too.”

Kevin jabbed his chest with his finger. “I was the one who wandered off. I started the whole goddamn mess. I’m the one who froze up under pressure.”

“Oh, Kevin,” Teresa said. “You were young and there was a lot of miscommunication. If you’d tried to do any more than you had, you’d probably be dead.”

Silence. Tracy put her hand on Kevin’s back. “We need to go on Tuesday,” she told him. “Okay?”

“I’m here, aren’t I?” Kevin’s voice caught, just a little, with these words. He peered down at his whiskey glass, surprised that it was empty, that a fresh drink stood beside it, that he had no recollection of drinking the first one.

Olivia Hallot stepped out of the kitchen with a deep pan of rum cake in one hand and a handful of forks in the other. “I don’t know about you guys, but I’m tired of waiting for my dessert.”

All laughed. The levity was well overdue.

“Ghost of O.D.’s telling us to eat,” Teresa said.

Two bites into his dessert, Kevin fell asleep in his chair. Teresa shook him awake and offered a ride back to the motel, but the Gilberts would have none of it, insisting he stay in one of the extra bedrooms for the night.

Three hours later, Kevin woke in the dark room, a rectangle of dim street light outlining unfamiliar curtains, and was for a moment panicked as he put together where he was. He’d stayed in the room many times—all of his and John Jr.’s rowdy nights, the times it was unwise to drive the five miles back to the ranch. The room smelled the same, a sort of warm musty odor.

Kevin tried to will himself back to sleep but after half an hour abandoned the effort. He snapped on the bedside light and reached for his jeans in a heap beside the bed. From the back pocket, he withdrew the folded three sheets of paper he’d printed out at the library. The half-inch headline read: BLOODBATH AT THE BORDER: 14 DEAD.