Two Days Gone Page 3

  Then there was a pause. And Huston told him, quietly, “You know about my parents probably.”

  DeMarco nodded. The bungled robbery of the Hustons’ hardware store, the blast that tore out his mother’s throat. His father’s suicide two weeks later from an overdose of his antidepressant. The horrific images that still haunted Thomas, the memories that sometimes overwhelmed him.

  DeMarco found himself so moved by the intimacy of that conversation that he nearly dragged out his own ghosts and demons for examination, thought that if he chose now, after all these years, to finally speak about that almost hallucinatory happiness of the early years of marriage and fatherhood, then the sudden violent extinguishment of it, his anger and too-aggressive behavior and the subsequent demotion, that here was a man who would understand. Unfortunately, he could bring himself to speak only elliptically of Ryan Jr. and to say of Laraine, “She left me not long after that.”

  Huston’s hand slid across the table as if to reach out to DeMarco, but it stopped short, and Huston said only, “Fuck, man. Jesus. I’m so sorry.”

  DeMarco nodded, but he was looking away now, watching the traffic go by outside, and he was relieved when Huston asked nothing more, and grateful when the server walked by and Huston told her, “We’re ready for the check now.”

  For their third meeting, in August, DeMarco was invited to a barbecue at Huston’s home. He met Huston’s beautiful wife and three beautiful children, was given a tour of the lovely Victorian, and spent the rest of that dulcet evening conscious of and resenting the heavy ache of envy deep in his chest.

  The envy reached its crescendo near dusk, with Huston and DeMarco seated side by side on lawn chairs, both relaxed, both watching the other guests. DeMarco was watching Tommy with one of his friends, the boys taking turns mugging with a Wiffle bat, tongues stuck in their cheeks like wads of tobacco, maybe imitating a parent or coach from Little League practice. The scene made DeMarco smile, and when he said to Huston, “He looks just like you,” he hadn’t meant it to sound as wistful as it did.

  But Huston obviously heard the underlying ache in the words—his eyes said that he had heard it—and he smiled too, and then both men remained silent for quite a while, two fathers smiling together at one son, both men painfully aware of the son who wasn’t there.

  And it was during those silent moments that DeMarco understood the true difference between Huston and himself. It had nothing to do with money or position. Both were solitary men in their own way, though DeMarco lived alone and Huston did not. Both had several complicated relationships with others. But Huston conducted all of his relationships from a solid center, from within the stabilizing orbit of his family, always venturing out from and returning to family, with his every action and reaction synchronized with family first, family last, family always, whereas DeMarco, on the other hand, had no center. He ventured out to the other relationships from emptiness, and to emptiness he returned. Every action synchronized with nothing. Emptiness first, emptiness last, emptiness always.

  Their final meeting took place the next morning, when Huston showed up at DeMarco’s door. He stood there grinning, holding a book in one hand, a cardboard carton in the other.

  DeMarco said, “Do I smell chili dogs?”

  “Ever try them for breakfast?”

  “I’ve always wanted to. C’mon in.”

  Huston handed him the carton, and DeMarco nodded toward the novel. “You going to read to me while I eat?”

  “I’m going to eat while you eat.” He laid the book atop a small lamp table against the wall.

  DeMarco read the cover. “The Desperate Summer?”

  “I know you’ve already read it, or at least pretended to. But this is a first edition. I inscribed it for you. From what I hear, they’re going for about a thousand per right now.”

  “Thank you,” DeMarco said. “I’ll put it up on eBay first thing tomorrow.”

  Huston grinned and slapped him on the arm. “What’s a good breakfast drink with chili dogs?”

  “There’s a pitcher of iced tea in the fridge. I’ll get the glasses and napkins.”

  They sat on the back porch, side by side on the edge above the steps, the carton of chili dogs between them. They ate the first dogs in silence. Halfway through his second one, Huston nodded at the overgrown yard. “Who’s your lawn boy?” he asked.

  “I ordered a goat from Amazon but it hasn’t arrived yet.”

  Huston chuckled. “I like the path, though. If you need any help someday…”

  “Yeah, well…” DeMarco finished his last hot dog, wiped his mouth with a napkin, took a sip of iced tea. “It’s sort of a project in limbo.”

  “Waiting for more bricks?”

  And that was enough, after ten seconds of silence, to open him up. It started with, “I haven’t worked on it since Laraine walked out. Same with the studio apartment I started in the garage out there.”

  “That little barn across the alley?”

  He nodded.

  “She left you after your baby died?”

  “A week after the funeral, my first day back to work. I came home and she was gone. Left her wedding ring on the kitchen counter.”

  After that, DeMarco recounted the accident that took baby Ryan’s life and finished with, “She lives by herself now, up in Erie. Mostly by herself. I still see her once in a while but… She’ll let me in, but she won’t say a single word to me. I can talk myself blue, and she won’t say a single word.”

  More silence passed. “You still wear your ring,” Huston said.

  “Neither one of us has ever filed. Never even mentioned it.”

  “So there’s still hope.”

  The silence continued for a long time after that. Finally, DeMarco pushed himself to his feet. “You’re right about this yard. I need to break out the lawn mower.”

  Now Huston stood. “Personally, I like the natural look.”

  DeMarco smiled. He stared at the path awhile longer, then turned to Huston. “Thanks for the dogs and the book. Thanks for stopping by.”

  DeMarco turned to face the porch, then bent down to fill his hands with the pitcher and empty glasses. “Just leave the carton there,” he said. “I keep my garbage can out in the garage.”

  Huston leaned closer and, with the heel of his fist, laid a soft punch on DeMarco’s arm. “Don’t be a stranger,” he said.

  “A stranger what?”

  Huston smiled, then turned and crossed along the side of the house, out to the sidewalk and his car.

  Only after DeMarco had washed out the pitcher and glasses and had crumpled up the hot dog carton and mashed it into the overflowing trash container under his sink did he retrieve Huston’s novel. He opened it to the title page.

  To my new good friend Ryan DeMarco, Huston had written in blue ink, this small token of appreciation—not for the information you provided, which I could have found on the Internet, but for the pleasure of your company. May that sadness in your eyes soon melt away, my brother, and may our supply of junkyard dogs never diminish.

  And now it was October, almost Halloween. Huston’s latest published book had been an international bestseller since the middle of September. The beautiful family now all lay on cold steel tables beneath cold white sheets. Huston was out there somewhere in the dark, tangled woods, and DeMarco had no stomach now for junkyard dogs or anything else.

  Six

  The troopers had been in the woods for less than an hour when DeMarco received the radio call. He had moved ahead of the others but stayed close enough that, if he looked over his shoulder, he could see the four canine units stretched out behind him in a line, each unit some twenty yards from the next. In the strengthening but still slant and broken light, the dogs moved as briskly as their leashes would allow, damp noses to the leaf-matted ground, their muscled bodies carving tight zigzagging paths. None of them h
ad yet found the scent they wanted. Each trooper carried a plastic bag containing an article of Huston’s clothing, and, from time to time, a dog would pull up short, lift its nose, and sniff the air, scanning from side to side and finally gazing up at its handler. The trooper would then hold the plastic bag open and allow the dog to poke its muzzle inside, freshen its memory with the unique scent of Thomas Huston, and soon the dog would lower its nose to the ground and pull forward again.

  Behind these canine units came the other troopers, an uneven line as wide as two football fields. Their orange vests flashed like huge fireflies flitting through the gray woods.

  Mutant fireflies, DeMarco told himself. Drawn here not by love, but by Huston’s rage and madness.

  He breathed in the scent of the woods as he walked, a damp and heavy fragrance, adumbrated and autumnal, the perfume of decay yet somehow fecund and sweet. DeMarco was a man who loved the dark woods, loved the stillness punctuated only by the chirp of birds, the chittering of a squirrel. He loved the thumping flight of a whitetail as it crashed through the brush. The explosive wing flutter of a flushed grouse. The distant warbling gobble of an amorous turkey.

  The crackle of his radio, on the other hand, was as startling as a bee in his ear. “Got a cave over here, Sergeant. Looks like he might have spent the night in it. Left flank, about a hundred yards from the lakeshore.”

  DeMarco sent the canine units ahead of him, ordered the other troopers to hold their positions. By the time he arrived at the shallow cave, the dogs were straining at their leashes, wanting to leap forward, whining with their eagerness to pursue the quarry.

  “Keep those animals still,” DeMarco told the handlers.

  He knelt outside the depression, shined a flashlight beam inside.

  “These pine branches were broken off, probably used to cover up the opening,” Trooper Morgan told him. Morgan was a slender man of medium height, long jawed and taciturn. He smiled frequently but infrequently spoke. “You can see over here where they were dragged along the ground.”

  DeMarco imagined what it must have been like for a man six feet tall to lay huddled in that tiny space. The earthen walls were indented with a hundred heel marks, half-moons gouged into the soil. DeMarco put his fingers to one of the heel marks. He rolled and turned and pushed at these walls through the longest night of his life. But the soil was cold. Huston had fled at least an hour earlier, leaving nothing behind but a damp depression filled with his scent. It was enough to make the dogs crazy, make saliva drip from their black gums, make their long tongues flap. But the sight of that hole filled DeMarco with grief. A brilliant man reduced to a beast.

  DeMarco pulled away from the cave and stood, flicked off the flashlight. He looked at the dogs. “Let’s get ’em moving,” he said.

  Two and a half hours later, legs weary, DeMarco and the four canine units paused along the edge of an unpaved road overlooking a swamp. On the photocopied map DeMarco carried, this area was labeled Cranberry Bog, but to DeMarco’s eyes, it was nothing more than a vast, wet morass of thorny bushes and vines. “There’s no way he went through this mess,” DeMarco said aloud, though only to himself.

  Three of the dogs sat panting beside their handlers; the fourth lay at his handler’s feet, chin in the dirt. DeMarco thought the posture of the dogs reflected dejection, maybe even embarrassment. Ten minutes earlier, Huston’s trail had intersected with the dirt road and, initially, had turned south. But after only thirty yards or so, the dogs had come to a halt, retreated, found the scent again, then sniffed their way northwest along the same road only to lose the trail at the edge of the swamp.

  And DeMarco said, “He changed his mind.”

  One of the troopers asked, “You think he’s headed home?”

  Another trooper said, “That wouldn’t be very smart, would it, Sarge?”

  DeMarco offered no reply. The dogs were idle, the troopers at a loss.

  Three of the troopers moved close together not far behind DeMarco. Only Trooper Morgan was from the Mercer County station, DeMarco’s station, and only he did not participate in the conversation.

  “You don’t think he waded or swam across that bog, do you?”

  “It would be a good way to put the dogs off.”

  “Yeah, but Christ, that water can’t be more than fifty degrees this time of year.”

  “It would take him, what, twenty, thirty minutes to wade across? He’d have hypothermia in ten.”

  “You say ‘wade’ like you know how deep it is.”

  “It’s a cranberry bog, for Chrissakes. How deep can it be?”

  “So you’re an expert on cranberry bogs?”

  “I know they aren’t very deep.”

  “Then how deep are they, genius?”

  “I’d say three to five feet. Somewhere in that range.”

  “So wade on out there and let’s see.”

  DeMarco flashed a look of annoyance at the trooper from his station. DeMarco and Morgan had known each other for seven years, had worked together many times. Morgan turned to the others now and said, “Keep it quiet, guys.”

  “Why bother?” one of them asked. “If he was anywhere near here, the dogs would know it.”

  Morgan faced the man who had spoken. “Quiet,” he said again.

  Overhead, the droning whir of a helicopter faded in and out as the craft flew a grid between the cranberry swamp and Lake Wilhelm. DeMarco thumbed down the button on his radio. “Still nothing?” he asked.

  A trooper in the helicopter studied his infrared screen. “I’ve got your group beside the swamp,” he said. “I’ve got the rest of the troopers making their way to where you are. Between them and you, nothing.”

  “Take it north of the swamp,” DeMarco said.

  A few minutes later, he received another report. “I’ve got one hotspot fleeing easterly,” the trooper informed him. “But it jumped over Black Run at about thirty miles an hour. So I doubt it’s our man.”

  DeMarco gazed out across the cranberry bog. Fifteen acres of freezing water, he thought. Fifteen acres of vines whipping at your face and arms and tangling around your legs.

  Where are you going, Thomas? he wondered. What’s that misfiring brain of yours telling you to do now?

  “So how do you think he got out of here?” one of the troopers asked. “You think he caught a ride with somebody?”

  Nobody answered.

  DeMarco pursed his lips, squinted, and stared out across the swamp. When he inhaled, he could smell a vague scent of something fruity, a subtle tang mixed with the darkness of the bog and the ache of inevitable winter. Cranberries? As far as he could tell, there wasn’t a cranberry in sight.

  He glanced again at his map, then reached for his radio, called the station, and told the dispatcher where to send the vehicles for pickup. Afterward, he walked down the short slope to the edge of the swamp and squatted on his haunches. He scooped up a handful of water and looked at it. Up close and in small amounts, the water lost its darkness, looked as clean and amber as good whiskey. He held it to his nose, inhaled its fragrance. He could smell the winter in it, could smell the dying fruit. He cupped his hand to his mouth, sucked in a sip of water. It was so cold that it burned his throat, so cold that it made him dizzy. He tilted his head back, squeezed shut his eyes, put one hand against the ground to steady himself from falling over.

  He did not know what to do with the ache running through him. He wished he could lower his head into the water and let its darkness blind him and let its chill numb his brain. Then he could crawl into a shallow depression in the ground and pull pine boughs atop him, and he would never come out, never think another thought.

  He knew that the four troopers up on the road were watching him, maybe whispering to one another. The dogs were probably watching him too. “Let them fucking watch,” he muttered to the water. “Let them fucking wonder.”


  Seven

  The first thing DeMarco did after returning to the barracks was to wash his hands. He washed his hands frequently, eight, ten times a day. He kept a package of antiseptic baby wipes in his car, another one in his desk. But this time, he went to the lavatory in the barracks because he wanted to splash water on his face too, thought the shock of cold water might knock the cobwebs from his brain. He soaped his hands thoroughly, scraped a thumbnail beneath each fingernail, rinsed off the soap, and splashed four handfuls of cold water in his face.

  His hands were clean, but the water on his face didn’t work. Fragments of thoughts floated through his brain like charred paper on water, thoughts that would not coalesce.

  Instead of returning to his office, he walked to an office down the hall, tapped twice on the glass, and opened the door. Trooper Jayme Matson looked up from behind her desk. She was thirty-six years old, twelve years younger than DeMarco, a tall, thin woman whom some of the troopers secretly referred to as “Ichabod.” But DeMarco knew her resemblance to the Sleepy Hollow ectomorph had more to do with the uniform than with her own physiology. He knew that in a sleeveless summer dress and two-inch heels, with her strawberry-blond hair hanging loose to her jawline and not knotted into a bun, she could look as elegant as a gazelle. He also knew the reason for the melancholy smile with which she now, and always, regarded him.

  “You still working on that master’s in psychology?” he asked as he stepped inside her office.

  “Nine more credits,” she said. “Why do you ask?”

  He pulled a chair up close to her desk and sat down. “Here’s a guy who’s got the world by the tail. Perfect family, great job…”

  She was already nodding. “Fame, reputation, respect, the whole package.”