And next to them lay a curl of tan-gray plastic. Little sprocket tracks on one side. He’d been around enough news photographers to recognize 35-mm film. Sometimes they tore
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off the end leader to mark the roll. He stood up and felt along the thick sheeting that walled the balcony off from the main room. The seam was parted. The staples had been removed and placed in an orderly line on the balcony railing. He pushed the plastic apart and looked down on the couches and chairs and his makeshift bed in front of the fireplace.
Pictures.
He left the ribbons and the clip of film exactly where he’d found them and went back down the ladder. Now is when you make your mind empty, Randall had taught him that. Just melt open your senses so everything makes an impression. Don’t think. Just see.
He flipped on the TV and watched the weather report out of Duluth. Another cold front was shuffling in, arrows from the northwest.
A stack of video tapes were piled next to the VCR. One stood out from the commercial movie names. A tape with a white label hand-written in felt-tip pen: PBS, Clark Group.
Pictures.
He poured a cup of coffee and ran the tape. Clark in his buckskin shirt. Another twenty sensitive guys in a semicircle on the floor of the lodge main room.
Clark moved ponderously across the screen, a fleecy cloud trying to turn into a thunderhead. His sermon was the shadow that dwelled in men. The primal force of their manhood. Harry killed the audio and watched the camera pan the seated men. Uh-huh.
Don Karson sat next to Karl Talme. Karson’s face was focused, really into this shit. Talme looked politely bored and uncomfortable sitting on the floor. The camera tracked. Bud’s wide back with red suspenders making an X in the middle of his spine. He turned, his face wreathed in the pride of authorship.
In a corner of the shot, Karson raised his hand and summoned off camera. He slid over to make room. Chris, his hair shorter in length, scrambled across the floor and hunkered next to Karson.
Karson smiled and put his arm around Chris’s slender shoulders, pulling him close in a hug. Leaned close to
278 / CHUCK LOGAN
the boy, whispered in his ear. Chris’s face shone in the camera lights, his expressive eyes sparkled.
Beautiful kid.
The angry emotional assumption proceeded at the speed of light.
Same conclusion Emery must have made. He stopped the tape, ran it back, watched Karson summon Chris, froze the tape there, and studied the skewed image of Chris’s smiling face until the pause function blipped off into static.
Chris’s death chose this moment to claw its way out of Harry’s chest. When the ghost of the person you kill chops a hole in your heart, he makes it roomy. Big enough to house his unlived life, an addition for the kids…
And suddenly more damn black clamoring night rushed behind his eyes than in the whole North Woods. No hope of sunrise for it.
A mighty urge for a drink sliced the darkness like a fin. Dipped down.
Call some folks.
Harry picked up the phone and dialed the house on River Road in St. Paul. He needed to talk to the man who he wished had been his father.
No good. Randall was still in the big city. “How you doing?” he asked Dorothy.
Her voice caused Harry to wince. Warmly ironic, a little high, she pondered, “My bed is a lonely raft in a rising tide of menopause.
How’s by you?”
Harry rubbed his eyes. “My probable-cause theory is falling apart.
Now I think the local Lutheran minister who’s been feeding me a line on the sheriff is into boys. Coulda been screwing the kid I shot.”
“Proof?”
“Just my intuition.”
“Harry, your intuition has a magical three-second attention span.
After that you need a seeing-eye dog.”
“You could be right.”
Dorothy sighed. “My man done stood me up, stayed on in D.C.
with the boys. I had a bubble bath and three glasses of wine. Now I’m reading Anne Sexton.”
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“Hope you have the razor blades locked up.”
She laughed. “I’m in my comfy bed. You’re up in the chiller-diller woods. Why don’t you give it up, Harry, walk away.”
“Can’t. There’s rules, Dorothy.”
“Are there? Sometimes I think there’s just lines painted on the road. All we do is hope everybody stays in their own lane.”
That struck him as very funny, very apt. He thanked Dorothy and hung up. What you get for messing in other people’s lives. For trying to figure them out. You cause accidents.
Peering into the embers in the fireplace, he recalled the painting that had hung over Chris’s bed. Saturn devouring his son. Emery, Cox, Bud. Chris wanted a father and his mother went on The Dating Game. What was scarier than looking too deep into a human family?
He was seeing through the hole that killing Chris had torn in his life. Young civilizations looked through that window and saw God.
Older ones just saw the void.
Harry saw a bottle.
He got a tumbler from the kitchen, sat it down on the cluttered table in the den, and poured it half full of whiskey.
Looked harmless. The golden eye of your favorite dog. Faithful, obedient. Forget the last time it bared his teeth.
The glass leaked a water ring on the pages of his detective musings, the names crossed out and rewritten, the arrows going in circles.
All the dots that refused to connect.
The .45 made a steel angle next to the glass. Scraps of cardboard from ammunition boxes, shotgun shells, and rounds for the .45-70
thick as brass fingers littered the table. Stumpy bullets for the .45
nestled, spring loaded in a spare magazine. He’d cleaned out his pockets. Change among the bullets. Keys. A wadded roll of $100
bills.
Another bad night in America getting ready to happen.
Harry reached for the glass. It was evil out
