that he burned flags and liked Internet porn. And of course there was the Seattle thing.'
She vaguely remembers television ads that had knocked Mason for going to college and working in Seattle, ads that accused him of being in the pocket of liberal Seattle power brokers.
'Yeah, that provincial shit is the gold standard in Spokane,' Evan says. 'We don't trust anyone who
'You know what he's done since the election?' Caroline asks, and she thinks, I know what he's doing. He's sitting in my interview room, writing his memoirs.
'No idea.'
'But he's not still involved in politics?' she asks.
'Mason? Nah. Lambs never run a second time. They go back to their insurance offices, or their teaching jobs at the community college.' Evan clears his throat. 'So, are you gonna keep going out with the guy?'
'I don't know,' Caroline says. She looks up in the window again and sees that Clark is still writing, that his face is shot with hard memories, with misgiving and regret. She leans forward and watches closely. And watching him like this she knows there is a body somewhere.
Caroline sits back. 'Yeah, you're probably right,' she says to Evan on the phone. 'I can do better.'
…
IV
1
Nobody emerges whole from childhood. I know this. And I don't pretend to think that the shattering of my left eye that day on the south bank of the Spokane River was in some way unique or was an unfair burden, that it put my suffering on a par with the suffering of someone like Eli Boyle. Truth is, I have got along fine with one eye. I can't say that it was a help in my run for the Fifth District congressional seat, or that I would knowingly choose the patches and glass eyes and dark sunglasses that I have worn since childhood, or that I have gone more than a day without shifting my gaze to the floor in the presence of the binocular, ever conscious of the fact that I am incapable of that most basic human communication – looking deep and straight in someone's eyes.
But except for the external nature of my scars, I don't imagine myself different from any other adult, limping and scuffling and scurrying along with all manner of insecurities and fears and defects, the results of bad parentage and low self-esteem, of being unprepared and unprotected in a world that seems on its surface so inviting and safe. The world is not safe. I need only continue the story of Eli Boyle's life to prove that.
But I am afraid I won't be able to offer a full accounting of Eli's indignities, for instance during our junior high years – the classroom-clearing farts, the daily capture and rolling of boogers between his fingers, the untold humiliations dreamed up by his classmates. There is simply not time.
So, Detective, in the event that I am unable to finish this statement, this story of Eli's life and death, which is also in some small way, I realize, the story of my own life and death (and the string of failures that connects them), then at least I can offer some proof of fidelity to you, to this arrangement you have made with me, to the comfort and understanding of your two eyes.
To you, Caroline, I offer this:
I did it.
I killed Eli Boyle.
If such a statement is all the court wants, then I am happy to no longer be an officer of that temple of disasters. And if such a confession is all that is required for deeper forgiveness, well… I don't look forward to the lines in heaven.
I took my friend's life, metaphorically and unintentionally when we were young, and then, two days ago, I ended it literally and with malice. And forever. And yet that is not the only crime I have to confess, and it is certainly not the most heinous, and if you think Eli Boyle is the only victim of my greed and anger, then you underestimate the heart's potential for darkness.
You told me this process usually begins with a body.
You may find Eli's at a house at the west end of Cliff Drive, not in the main house, empty and cold, with its Gatsby staircase and deco chandeliers, but in the small, dank apartment above the garage out back. He is lying on the floor, in a lake of his own blood. He is on his left side, with his left arm behind him and his right against his head, as if something important has just occurred to him. There is a long black hole in his head, from his jaw to his scalp. I put the hole there.
I will forever be haunted by the look on his face in the moments before the horrible event played itself out. I saw that look once before, a look of surrender, of disbelief, a look that asks how life can keep getting
We were in high school. (I skip the horror of junior high with the request that you pause a moment to calculate your own adolescent social pain, multiply it by a thousand, and figure that you are still well short of Eli Boyle's.)
We arrived the way every kid. has ever arrived in high school, taller but no smarter than our elementary selves, swimming in self-consciousness, wishing at once to be universally loved and left alone. I had been fitted for my first glass eye, and hated the way it sat unmoving and creepy in its drooped socket, staring straight ahead while my other eye bounded like a puppy from corner to corner of my skull. I will share a few of my old nicknames, skipping over such obvious names as Cyclops and Patch and Cap'n Hook, names insulting only in their lack of imagination. My favorite – Dead Eye – worked on two levels, in that case to describe both my injury and my free-throw shooting accuracy in basketball. I appreciated Ol' One Ball for its suggestiveness, McGoo for its canny reference to the old goggle-eyed cartoon character, Eye-nstein for its nod to my high grade point average, Glass for its jazzy simplicity, Lefty for its ironic coolness, and Lighthouse for its clean imagery.
As I said, I smoked pot nearly every day in junior high school, but then quit suddenly before my sophomore year of high school. Two things happened that summer: My former friend and supplier Everson moved to Sacramento, and I woke up one morning six feet tall and 175 pounds. With the sudden physical change I decided, the way teenagers decide, that from that moment on I wasn't who I had been. I was now an athlete, in spite of the lung damage caused by three years of pot smoking and the even more daunting disadvantage that I couldn't see a thing out of the left side of my head.
Most coaches, it turns out, will make room for the early-developed on the offensive and defensive lines in football and on the bench in basketball, so I managed to make teams and even start a few games and figure in their outcomes. But I doubt that I distinguished myself in anyone's memory of those games – except once. That moment took place during my senior year, against our hated basketball rival in their packed, raucous gym, when the player ahead of me fouled out early in the fourth quarter and the coach sent me in to kill time, hoping that I would do
