Bo said, “I’d like to talk to Luther Gallagher.”
Ishimaru glanced at her watch. “Not at this hour. Go on home and get some rest. You can check him out tomorrow.” Rosie Mortenson slipped past them and went to her car. Ishimaru took one final look at the empty room. “I admit this is getting curiouser and curiouser, Bo. But we still have no evidence that connects Ableman to Tom Jorgenson’s accident. For that matter, we still have no proof that a crime has been committed.”
“I’ll get the proof.”
“Get it tomorrow, Bo. Tonight, get some sleep.”
But Bo knew sleep was going to be impossible. There were too many unanswered questions, and he’d roll them over and over in his mind until the sun came up. So he took I-94 to the beltway, swung south of the Twin Cities, and picked up Minnesota 169 heading southwest toward St. Peter, where Luther Gallagher lived. As he drove out of the bubble of urban light, the country night closed in around him, and the number of stars in the sky seemed to multiply. Distant yard lights became beacons that indicated farmhouses set among broad fields. The moon lit the land, and the highway was a long white corridor between silvered stalks of corn and leafy soybeans. He was heading into the country that long ago had been the site of his salvation.
Bo’s memories of his father were vague and shadowy. A huge shape looming over him, dark against the sunlit slats of venetian blinds. The smell of diesel fuel on big hands. A ride once atop broad shoulders to watch a parade. Only bits and pieces, as if he were always looking at fragments of torn-up photographs.
His father left when Bo was five years old. Ran off, according to Bo’s mother, with some Frederick’s of Hollywood whore who had all her brains between her legs. Bo never understood why his father would leave. Even Bo recognized how attractive his mother was. She was pretty enough to be in the movies. The men she brought home were always telling her that.
When Bo was fourteen, they lived in a run-down apartment building in an old section of St. Paul known as Frogtown, within sight of the golden horses that topped the capitol. His mother worked nights as a cocktail waitress; days, she slept off her weariness or slept off the booze. Bo was left pretty much on his own. Sometimes he went to school, but often he did not. He spent a lot of time on the streets. Although he was small for his age, he had an attitude that made kids much larger steer clear of him. He had a juvenile record, nothing serious, mostly truancy, a couple of incidents of shoplifting, one charge of criminal trespass that was eventually dropped. He’d done other things, just never been caught. Several social workers had threatened to put him in a foster home, but the truth was, and they all knew it, there were kids much worse than Bo, and much worse off. His mother kept a roof over his head and food in the cupboards. Bo knew how to wash his own clothes (and hers), and how to cook his own meals (and hers).
Bo loved his mother. He also sometimes hated her. It wasn’t uncommon for him to leave the apartment in a rush of anger, aiming back over his shoulder a parting shot that usually went something like, I wish you were dead. They argued about everything. His truancy, her drinking. His friends, her boyfriends. His dreams, her realities. Sometimes as he headed out the door, she called him back suddenly and held his face between her hands. “You wouldn’t ever leave me, would you?” she’d ask, as if she were seriously afraid. If it had been a good day, he’d answerDon’t be silly. If they’d argued, he was likely to sayDon’t bet on it. Their fights could be verbally brutal, but until the last night he saw her alive she’d never laid a hand on him.
He was in a fight at school that day. He’d been talking to the girlfriend of a kid named Krakhauer, when Krakhauer gave him a hard shove from behind and slammed him headfirst into the lockers. Bo coldcocked the kid. It didn’t matter that Bo hadn’t started things. Krakhauer was the one bleeding all over the hallway floor when the vice principal showed up. Bo was suspended. No big deal. It always struck him as odd punishment, this banning him from school, because school was a place he’d just as soon avoid anyway.
His mother came home late that night, drunk, and not alone. Bo was awake, lying in his bed. He’d waited up, wanting to talk about the fight, the suspension. When he heard the other voice, he grew angry. Once things started on the other side of the thin wall that separated his bedroom from his mother’s, he got up and got dressed. As he was heading toward the front door, his mother came from her room.
“It’s one o’clock in the morning. Where the hell do you think you’re going?” She’d thrown on an old robe that she held closed over her breasts with the clutch of one hand. In the other hand, she held an empty gin bottle.
“Why?” Bo asked. “You want me to pick up some booze for you?”
“Don’t get smart with me.” Her hair, long and blonde and disheveled from what had been going on in the bedroom, lay fallen over one eye. She brushed it away with the back of the hand that held the empty bottle.
“I’m going out.” He gave a surly glance toward her closed bedroom door.
Her own eyes went there, too, and everything about her seemed to sag. She came close to him, and when she spoke again, she’d softened. “You wouldn’t ever leave me, would you?”
Bo was sick to death of it. Sick to death of everything. And he said the cruelest thing he’d ever said to her. “He left you, you know, because you weren’t pretty enough.”
She drew back as if Bo had struck her. Then she let go her hold on the robe and slapped him. The robe fell open. Bo could see the stretch marks on her breasts and belly. “You will not speak to me that way,” she said in a choked voice. “I’m your mother, goddamn it.”
“That’s not my fault, goddamn it,” Bo threw back at her. He turned and stormed out the door.
It was a long way to the river, and Bo walked the whole distance in heated strides. The streets were empty. The season was autumn, the night cool and windy. All around him Bo heard the scrape of dead leaves on pavement. He made for a grove of cottonwood trees near the High Bridge where an old school bus sat wheel-less in tall grass. The bus smelled of urine and was full of litter, but it offered seclusion and a measure of protection, and kids often gathered there to get high and sometimes to crash. As he approached, he could see a glowing ember in the dark inside.
“Hey, man,” a voice called to him in a laid-back greeting.
“Otter, that you?”
“Halloween in a couple of weeks, Spider-Man. I thought maybe you were a goblin.” Otter laughed softly. He sat near the middle of the bus with his feet propped on the back of the seat in front of him. He was a tall kid, awkward-looking, but when he moved it was with a slow kind of grace that always put Bo in mind of a giraffe. “Late to be out, even for you.”
“You, too,” Bo said. He sat down across the aisle from Otter and accepted the joint his companion offered.
“The devil’s in my old man tonight. Figure I’m better off here until he cools down.”
Otter’s old man was infamous. A huge railroad worker, he was a brute who laid into his son with frightening regularity. Bo had often sat in the bus with Otter while his friend smoked or drank away the pain of a beating.
“So what’s up?” Otter asked.
They were hardly more than a stone’s throw from downtown St. Paul, and the lights of the city drizzled a neon illumination over the grove of cottonwoods and the bus within it. Bo could see Otter’s face, long and serene.
“Fight with my mom,” Bo replied.
“I wouldn’t mind fighting with your mom,” Otter said. The attractiveness of Bo’s mother was a constant subject of comment among Bo’s friends.
“She hit me,” Bo said. “She’s never hit me.”
“She hit you hard?”
“Doesn’t matter. She hit me.”
“It matters, believe me,” Otter said.
They were quiet for a while. Bo saw something big moving on the river. The trees made it difficult to see exactly what, and the wind through the branches covered any sound.
“Hear that?” Otter said
Bo heard only the wind and the leaves.
“I think it’s the dead getting restless.”
“What are you talking about?” Bo asked.
“I’ve been hearing it a lot tonight. With Halloween coming on, I figure all those dead folks are getting anxious for a little action.”
Otter was definitely stoned, probably drunk as well. The restless dead thing Bo decided to chalk up to altered
