Darkness All Around

1

It’s a body. That’s all I know."

The woman’s voice coming through the phone was still new to him. He had met her only once, after she had hired him, in a rushed introduction to the central offices of the paper in nearby Docksport. She had been uninterested in him, insisted on calling him Hank when he said he preferred Henry, said he really didn’t need to know anything about the central office in this fucking computer age, hacked up a gob of phlegm that she then swallowed and would probably chase with a cigarette as soon as she could, and dismissed him swiftly when news came that a school supply storage shed in Upton had burned to the ground. He could barely remember her name: Doris Whiting.

You got a car yet? she asked now.

Not yet. I’m . . .

Well, pedal your ass out there and let me know what’s up. Find the sheriff. Armey. Jack Armey. Townies are going to be standing around fucking lost. Jack’s a Nam vet. He’s seen a dead body or two. And don’t take any ‘no comment’ shit from him. Get him to grunt something. That cell phone we gave you might not work out there. Go to The Ding Dong and ask Walt if you can use his phone.

She hung up. He looked out the gable window of his single-room apartment over the Rumskis’ one-car garage and saw that a gray day had dawned. He was cotton mouthed and hungover, and shuffled through a couple of crushed beer cans to his cramped half bathroom, thinking he was going to throw up. But after standing in front of the toilet for a couple of minutes he realized he wasn’t going to heave then. That would come later, he guessed. When he saw the body.

He was pedaling hard uphill against a light wind, a little spitting rain blurring his vision, when he realized he didn’t have his helmet or his notebook. Or a pen. He looked down at himself to make sure he was actually wearing clothes. He had covered mock murders before, mock accidents, one just weeks ago, before graduation, but this was the real thing. What kind of real thing, he didn’t know. It’s a body. A body in a wooded area off a two-lane country road. Doris had said there were some details on the scanner, but she didn’t trust them. She wanted eyes and ears on the ground. A week and a half on the job, a couple of nights getting shitfaced with a new friend. Was he ready for this?

He crested the hill and saw a long flat stretch of road and a cluster of cop cars and an ambulance in the distance, about a quarter of a mile before The Ding Dong, the roadside tavern he’d helped close down two or three nights ago. What was the sheriff’s name? He fished a piece of paper out of his pants pocket. Armey. The light rain stained the writing. Hadn’t there been some kooky congressman from this part of Pennsylvania named Armey?

He put the paper back in his pocket and realized he had a pen after all. He braked quickly when he saw a flattened paper bag by the side of the road. He was ready now. He had his tools.

After he got off his bike and moved in the direction a couple of cops were heading, a trooper held out his hand. Henry showed his newly minted press ID and the trooper scowled, looking down at his parked bike.

You workin’ on a reporter merit badge or something?

I’m new.

You goin’ up there to see the body?

Yes.

You won’t be new for long.

He had folded the paper bag and stuffed it in his back pocket, hoping when he had to take notes he could do so surreptitiously. He caught up with the cops, who he thought were town cops, introduced himself, asked for Armey. Both of them were close to his age and looked as nervous about what they were about to see as he was. They said Armey had gone up about five minutes earlier. He asked what the cops knew as they tramped through brown weeds and then brush leading to a stand of hardwoods. They shrugged, not with indifference but with something like fear.

A trooper surprised them, running out of the woods, barking into a walkie-talkie. They parted and he ran through them without acknowledging their presence. The younger of the two cops stopped and shook his head, giving his partner a defeated, pleading look.

He said we didn’t have to do this. I ain’t gonna do it.

Don’t pussy out on me. This is real shit.

You take the nightmare. I got enough.

He turned and walked back down the incline. The other cop had a moment of decision, flipped his cohort the bird, and kept walking. He was mumbling and about to say something coherent when they looked up to see a small gaggle of troopers and cops in a clearing ahead.

Though the cop with him slowed at the sight, Henry kept moving. In the days and months later, when he told the story, when he wrote about it, he couldn’t say what it was that hooked fingers in his nostrils and hauled him forward, that made him think he wasn’t going to throw up, that had him reaching for his flattened-out paper bag notebook. A reporter’s curiosity? The clarity that comes when a hangover lifts? A sense of duty? He didn’t know, he didn’t care. He simply went up to a spot where he could see all as the technicians and the ME and the cops hovered and worked and photographed and jabbered. He stood with his pen and his paper bag, but he made no attempt to take notes.

Who the fuck are you?

Henry had not yet glimpsed the body when the gravelly voice barked at him. He turned to see a man in his fifties, wearing a faded Eagles T-shirt over a sizable paunch, shorts, flip-flops, and a seed cap that said SHERIFF on the front. Henry held out his ID.

Henry Saltz. I’m the new—

Yeah. Don’t touch anything, okay? He started to walk away.

Sheriff?

What?

Can I get a comment from you?

Sure. Tell Doris to lay off the fucking exclamation points and report the fucking facts. I guess that goes for you too, Wet-Behind-the-Ears.

Okay. What are the facts?

Armey gestured toward the body. Take a look. He moved away.

Henry waited until the ME and a photographer weren’t blocking his view. He then took a couple of steps forward, as if he were approaching a casket at a wake. He heard a voice to his right say, . . . waitress at The Ding Dong. Henry knew then what he was looking at. But he didn’t make a note as he took another step. Then as he came close to the body, as he saw its features, something kept him from seeing the corpse as dead. He both lost focus and saw things with utter clarity. He looked through the body to something deeper.

She had been pretty and alive, but that had been days ago, when she walked and laughed. Now she was part of the earth, a fallen log across the trail, gravity and the elements working to make her one with the soil. She was no longer whole, but she was recognizable, her hacked, cubist features hinting at the woman she had been. He could see that woman in sunshine, with white teeth and shiny legs, with glistening hair curving over an ear. He could see how untouchable she had been, a perfect specimen of grace and form. The more he looked, the deeper he went. He knew her now, in a way no one could ever have known her in life. To the cops she was a broken body, a case, a puzzle, but to him she was elemental existence. Whatever had happened had closed off one thing, closed off time and space for her, but it had opened him to new life. As contradictory as all this was to any rationality, he didn’t question it. He felt it with ever more assurance. The cops were looking at an endpoint. He was looking at a commencement.

There was a small commotion and a trooper came into the circle gingerly holding a curving machete between his latexed thumb and forefinger. The blood-caked metal made sense to the cops. They could see how it had been used, how it explained the beauty pageant ribbon of open flesh from her shoulder to her hip. But to him it was an intrusion, an ugly mechanism that explained nothing, that was all surface. He would write about it, but in the first flush of its appearance it had the effect of pulling him back from the fuller picture. He wanted to stay in the presence of this creature, lifeless as she was, to know in his bones and his heart that all was over for her, that all was over for him. These weren’t things you could write about. You could barely feel them. But here they were now. He only wanted to stay.

Then the sheet came over her, and as it fluttered down on what he would later call the remains, it was as if a curtain had been dropped on a stage, on a play. The end. That’s all, folks. He raised the flattened paper bag, but he knew he had nothing much to write. He didn’t need to make notes. He would never, ever forget any detail of what he saw.

Nor could he ever write the strange yet certain sentence forming in his head now, billowing like blood from a wound, giving him finality and assurance despite the almost depraved incongruity of the words. He fought against letting the sentence have life, but the battle only agitated him more. Blood soaked through the sheet and he saw again the macheted flesh. Henry was at war with himself now, working to keep the sentence at bay. But finally it burst through from nascent words to something whole. Then, as if the sentence were a physical manifestation, Henry turned, took two steps back, and covered a photographer’s open camera bag with a spray of vomit. But that couldn’t stop the words from surfacing. As the photographer protested, Henry only looked back at the draped body.

Whatever happened to her, he said to himself, maybe she deserved it.

2

The drunk would remember nothing of what was about to happen to him. But that wasn’t unusual. He couldn’t say who he was, couldn’t say where he came from. When strangers asked, he’d simply nod or mumble or give any answer he thought might get him away from them, with enough money for a bottle.

He woke this morning with the hunger, the ever-present hunger, competing with a biting cold for his attention. When he was upright and able to make out shapes in the frozen, brick-strewn basement, he could see his fingers as bluish blobs at the ends of his hands. Some primal instinct launched him out of the basement, out into a wind-whipped street. Those bluish fingers meant something, like storm clouds to a farmer. There was some danger lurking. He had no memory, but his brain stem could still react.

Subway. Warmth. He tried to move his feet, but they seemed foreign, rooted, blocks of ice. Then they began to move, as if on their own. People wrapped tightly against the wind rushed by him. He tried to follow them, something told him to follow them, but he couldn’t keep up and the wind blared in his face.

Then suddenly there was a hole in the ground and stairs and legs and feet running up and down the stairs and sounds of scraping metal in the hole. He limped down the stairs, one agonizing step at a time, until he was at the bottom and out of the wind. There was a ticket booth and the ratchet noise of turnstiles. Something gigantic, an express train, filled the cavity of the station with a deafening thrum for a full minute before it disappeared.

He was able to fling open a door between him and the platform. An alarm sounded, a scratchy loudspeaker voice shouted at him. He shuffled toward the tracks and the warmth as people on the crowded platform parted for him. He heard a sharp voice, saw the woman cop’s blue uniform stretched over large breasts. Knowing this sign as he knew the blue in his fingers, he turned to walk the other way, but the turning was too much. The platform tilted heavily to the right, though the passengers waiting were unfazed. He tried to right himself, but then the platform fell out from underneath him and he dropped to the hard bed of rails and ties.

He was still conscious, but the screaming that was going on above meant little to him. The metal his hand rested on was warm, the ties not uncomfortable. Maybe this had been his destination after all, not the train car with the angry eyes where all moved away from him, but the tracks. He would rest. He closed his eyes.

Then the screaming became the screeching of brakes, and a piercing light grew in his head. Sure hands yanked his collar, choking him, rolling him to the center gutter of the tracks. The screeching became unbearable, drowning the woman’s voice in his ear. He fought to get her off him. She flailed at his wild arms. He got his head off the concrete, and as he did, a huge shadow raced over them, sparks from the rails showering the undercarriage, giving him a brief glimpse of the strut that clobbered him into oblivion.

The blow set off a riot of change in the drunk’s brain. Massive subdural hematomas exploded on both sides of his frontal lobes, cascading blood and swelling and destructive pressure to the tissue and gray matter beneath. The synapses and neurons in memory centers began winking out like city lights in a fast-spreading blackout. Childhood, adolescence, and yesterday shut down as the nerves that carried their messages became pinched and blood soaked. Then one by one the major, never-to-be-forgotten memories, the ones grooved so deeply they could never be touched, were found by the flooding brain and engulfed. The birth of his son went. His father’s limp, hanging body. His wife’s shining eyes.

And then the last one, the one he had spent years trying to poison out of his brain. It was the dark, bleak vision of a lifeless body, only a foot from his face, almost unrecognizable as a body. And with this came a close-up of the unmistakable instrument of that body’s destruction: a curved, bloody, murderous machete.

And then nothing.

3

Warren, I’ve gotta close up for a few hours. You’re going to have to go outside."

Warren Mastic, still dapper, still firmly planted in his spot at the bar, still twirling the glass of club soda in front of him, looked across the polished wood at Risa Tuvic and smiled the smile of the lost.

Peggy?

That was my mother, Risa responded, knowing most of the lines that would follow.

You’ve got great legs.

Should have told her that when you had the chance, Warren.

It might rain.

It might, but not likely. Look outside. Hot day. No clouds. Perfect weather for Scrimmage Day. It’s Scrimmage Day, Warren. Everybody’s over at the stadium. I’ve gotta close up. Your daughter’s coming to get you. I’m going to put you on the bench outside.

Warren smiled and sipped his club soda. He was the last patron left in The Kitchen, a large, light-filled one-room bar-restaurant Risa’s father had opened forty years earlier, a place Risa had, reluctantly at times, called home her entire thirty-nine years. A thin woman with sandy hair, calm cheekbones, and green eyes that were both inviting and watchful, she had been a town darling since the days she, as a six-year-old, used to waitress for her father and mother, taking a good five minutes to precariously get a glass of ice water to a table without spilling it.

I’ll just have another, Warren said, indicating his club soda, which was only half empty.

Risa looked at the clock. It was three forty. No matter how much she rushed it, she was going to be late. She looked at Warren and in a second the urgency that had been pushing her the last hour, the need to get the afternoon’s loose ends tied up, to get The Kitchen closed, drained from her, and she wanted nothing more than to refill Warren’s glass and stay where she was.

In a few hours, after the high school football scrimmage that gave the day its name, The Kitchen would be packed. Laughter would bounce off walls clotted with photographs, proclamations, ribbons, flags, and plaques. Over the years the homey space had been not only a bar and restaurant but also a union hall, a political club, and a common ground for the Poles, Greeks, and Ukrainians whose parents had come to dig coal and stayed to work in the postwar factories. Risa’s father, Sim, had been a uniter, a man whose goodwill and charm made people flock to his restaurant, to him, and to rub elbows with people of other ethnicities their parents had warned them about.

The crowd that would fill The Kitchen would be buzzing about the football team, but it was a far cry from the days when local politicians would be holding court in one corner, a Greek Orthodox priest would be accepting a dinner from his parishioners, and news that the Top-Co plant was expanding yet again had diners wondering just how big the truck parts manufacturer could get.

I got back from Korea in 19 and 53, Warren said, as if Risa had asked him.

That’s right. Risa knew she shouldn’t be standing there, that she should be going, but something had her rooted. Voices from the last few hours, the see yas and can’t waits and this is going to be greats hung in the slanted light coming through The Kitchen’s front windows along with the dust motes. Every one of those heartfelt salutations had made her wish that her presence was not required at Bulldog Stadium.

And when you came across the old bridge, Risa said, finishing Warren’s usual recitation, you kissed the pavement on Market Street and said you’d never leave Braden again.

Warren smiled. Peggy?

He didn’t resist being led out the front door of the restaurant. He sat on the slatted bench that accommodated the overflow on Friday nights. Warren’s daughter had asked Risa to tie Warren to the bench with a dish towel so he wouldn’t wander away, but something in this went against Risa’s nature. She was not the type to tell people what to do, and the role of jailer certainly didn’t fit. She thought maybe she’d just sit with Warren until his daughter showed up. But that was foot dragging too, and after a few minutes she secured Warren’s forearm to the armrest and patted his shoulder.

She’ll be right here, Warren.

Peggy?

That was my mother, Warren.

Sim around?

Not really. He’s up at the cemetery.

What’s he doing up there?

Resting. I gotta go. See you tomorrow.

Warren looked straight ahead and Risa backed away, watching to see if Warren would chafe at the dish towel shackle. He didn’t, and when she reached the corner of Third and Williams, she turned and walked forward. Now, with Warren behind her, she had to confront the problem that had been growing all afternoon. What was she afraid of? Why did she dread walking into Bulldog Stadium when anyone in her right mind would see such an entry as triumphal? BENSON FOR CONGRESS signs that shouted out her husband’s name from every shop on Third should have made her glow with pride, but they only widened the bubble in her stomach. The Bulldog souvenir shop, closed for the afternoon, of course, had the same effect, though it too should have made her swell with affection for her town, for her son.

What was going on? Whatever it was hadn’t just suddenly come to her. The whole summer had been fraught, anxious, the flooding on the Susquehanna more like something she was feeling than river water overflowing its banks. For a time she thought it was the campaign, the appearances, the handshaking and plastered smiles she knew Alan and all around her expected. That wasn’t her, but she made it seem as if it were. Was she paying the price for that sort of playacting? No, that was not fun, but it didn’t have the same sort of ominous quality as this other, inchoate feeling.

She had one foot off the curb crossing Market when the sharp blast of a bus horn made her jump back. A rush of hot wind, metal, and glass swept past her as the bus blew by. She saw her reflected image distort and wobble on the brown surface of the bus’s flank. She caught her breath and watched the incongruous machine slow and make its wide turn onto Fifth Street. She didn’t have to see the destination sign on the front to know the bus was from New York.

She looked to her left, where the bus had come across the bridge into town, down to where it left when it was heading east into the city. The valley below, the scruffy hills beyond were hazy in the late afternoon sun. That view, down Market Street to the bridge and beyond, had always been a loaded one for Risa. It was the escape route to all the things Braden wasn’t. She had taken it once, into Philadelphia for drawing classes, for the excitement of the city, for a clichéd but loving affair with a teacher. And she wished now she could be on a bus for anywhere rather than going to the stadium.

She crossed Market, shaking off any thought that what she was feeling had to do with the world outside Braden. It wasn’t that. In the middle of the block she pushed open the door to the Benson for Congress headquarters and felt the icy air within. She had strongly suggested to Lilly Barkin, Alan’s campaign manager, that a warmer temperature in the storefront, a former Verizon showroom, would save money and show the candidate to be ecofriendly. Lilly had ignored her. Risa had let it go. Now Lilly, a fiftyish country club doyenne, working hard to have her picture next to the word imperious in the dictionary, came toward Risa in full screech.

What are you doing here? It’s almost four. We’re doing all the press before, Risa, before. Didn’t Alan tell you?

He told me.

Well, hop, skip. Have you got your car?

No.

Mine’s on Market. Let’s go.

I’m gonna walk.

Oh, no you’re not. Lilly was texting as she talked. I can get things delayed a little. I told Coach there might be a few glitches. He’s going to—pause for sending something on her BlackBerry—he’s going to pull Kevin out and we’ll do sort of a family hug kind of thing, you know, the ‘go get ’em, son’ shtick with the team in the background running around.

Though it was the myth that every soul able to walk in Braden ringed the field for the storied Braden Area High School football team’s annual rollout known as Scrimmage Day, Risa suspected that Lilly and her ilk rarely left their tanning chaises to inspect the Bulldog squad at close range, to ooh and ahh over the newcomers, to tsk at Coach’s early season decisions. If she had, she would have known that a family hug, even for a popular politician in the middle of a fairly tight race, was a no-no. The warriors parading before the town weren’t to be thought of as mortals on Scrimmage Day. They were in the clean slate portion of their schedule, and for this afternoon they were on pedestals with no space for families.

I’m going to walk, Lilly, Risa said, turning toward the door. And I wish you’d turn the air down in here.

Lilly bobbed her head up from her BlackBerry, prepared to physically escort Risa to her car. But Risa was gone.

In more ways than one. She took a quick turn up Columbia Street to avoid Lilly running after her and kept her head down as she trudged the little incline that would lead to Saffron Park and then the stadium. Kevin, she knew now, was at the center of her dread. Fifteen, about to enter his sophomore year, his name had been buzzing around The Kitchen for weeks. This year we’re going to have some defense, was the consensus, and the reason most often given was that Alan Benson’s stepkid, Risa Tuvic’s son, had hefted up over the winter and looked like he was going to be a linebacker the likes of which hadn’t been seen in Braden since Rick Staussen broke heads two decades earlier. Alan had treated all this cracker-barrel chatter as an adjunct to his campaign, making it clear to anyone who hadn’t noticed that it was he who had raised Kevin from his sixth year on, that it was he who had drilled him in the basics from Pee Wee ball to middle school, and even over the winter. And he made sure that Kevin’s touted toughness was seen by all as an echo of Alan and his political philosophy.

Risa hadn’t seen Kevin play football in years. The last time she had seen him, in a middle school game on a frozen November Saturday morning, he had been involved in some wild scrum over a fumble and had cracked his left index finger. She had broken all the rules by going out onto the field and helping him off, something the coaches had strictly warned the parents not to do. The finger, dangling from the second knuckle, was an image she carried with her still. Those watching the game had carried something else away. Kevin Collins, his finger clearly snapped, had asked to go back in.

Risa had made excuses since then, saying she had too much to do at the restaurant, making sure her class in Philadelphia met on fall weekends, even once feigning sickness. She heard much about Kevin’s progress from Alan and from customers and from Kevin himself, enough that she felt she knew how things were going. She knew, for instance, that Coach had deliberately kept him off the traveling team the year before, made him run opposition plays in practice, in order to make him hungry, according to Alan. That strategy seemed to have worked.

But in other ways he was still the gentle Kevin she had given birth to seven months after graduating from college. He was a considerate kid, thinking of others often, a good science student who also appreciated the art his mother made. When he grew taller than Risa he was fond of looping an arm around her shoulder, a gesture of affection as well as a very visible sign that he was becoming a man.

Risa entered Saffron Park as a breeze rippled the leaves of the neatly planted ginkgos, the late afternoon sun brushing the tops of the trees. She stopped, even though she knew she should be storming through the park to get to the stadium. Saffron, only a few blocks from The Kitchen, had been her refuge as a child. Instead of doing her homework at a back table in the restaurant, she would bring her books to the small, green oasis and be calmed by the little patch of nature. She wished she could sit now and just watch the dancing leaves. But she could hear the drums of the marching band coming from the stadium, and she knew she had no recourse but to go there and play her role. Kevin, that morning, had made sure she would show up by literally taking her aside, as he left for the morning practice, and guiding her into the kitchen, looking her in the eye and telling her how much the day meant to him.

You’re not going to flake on me today, are you, Mom?

Of course not.

Dad’s counting on you too.

Kevin, come on. I wouldn’t miss this for the world.

Kevin had cocked his head and given her a look that said he didn’t quite believe her. I’m starting now, Mom. We’ve got all the elements in place. That’s what Coach says. And I’m one of the elements. Do you know what that means?

Hey, I’ve lived in this town a lot longer than you have.

Yeah, but—

I was a cheerleader. You haven’t forgotten that, have you?

No, but I still don’t believe it. An old joke between them.