A short bark of laughter is out before I can stop it.
An eyebrow arches above the sunglasses. “Something funny?”
“If you knew him,” I say, my voice growing hard, “you wouldn’t have asked that
question. He was a good man.”
“Oh? He would have done the right thing, you think?”
“Always.”
He nods.
“Look, did you need something? I’ve got a customer waiting on me, so….” “Old-timer? Yeah, he hasn’t stopped staring at me since I got here.” Agent
Corwin waves at Abe, who is still standing at the window. Abe doesn’t wave back. “Nice guy,” Corwin says.
I wait.
Finally, “What’s the word on the wind, Benji?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
He cocks his head at me. “This is a small town, right? Doesn’t everyone know everyone else’s business here? Rumors usually spread like wildfire.”
“Maybe,” I say slowly. “But I’ve never been one to care about that sort of thing.”
He reaches back behind him, and I think for a moment he’s going to go for a gun, or handcuffs, and I think that maybe I’ve done something wrong, that I shouldn’t have looked into things like I did. I want to tell him I’ve left it alone for a while now, even though it is still there in the back of my head, white noise that won’t ever disappear.
He hands me a business card instead. The FBI seal. His name. His phone number is listed, and for a moment, I zero in on the last two digits: seventy-seven. “You call me you ever start to care about that sort of thing,” he says. He’s mocking me, but he doesn’t know that I know.
“Sure,” I say.
He asks me to fill up the car and I do. He pays me and leaves without another word. I return to the garage.
“What’d he want?” Abe asks me, sounding worried.
“I don’t know,” I say honestly, showing him the card. “Just asked about Dad and… I don’t know.”
Abe shakes his head. “Big Eddie?” he asked, his eyes wide. “Why’d he want to know about him?”
“Just… he asked me if I thought Dad was a good man.”
Abe snorts. “Good man. Big Eddie was the greatest man. Don’t you dare believe otherwise. I loved that man as if he were my own. Blast it all, he was my own. And the only thing you need to concern yourself with is to keep doing what you’re doing. He’d be proud of you, Benji. I just know it.”
I nod, unable to speak.
His eyes soften. “We’re the same, you and I,” he says again.
We are. I really think we are.
I assure him I’m okay.
I can tell he doesn’t believe me.
Throughout the afternoon, a spring thunderstorm etches its way across the
Cascades. It looked like the mountains would hold the storm off from dropping down into the valley, lightning flashing near the peaks, but as I start to close up the shop for the night, the air smells of rain and ozone. Ripples of thunder peal through the air, crashing and causing the ground to vibrate underneath my feet. There’s no rain, and the air is heavy with static.
My father was a great man.
It’s this I think as I sit at a stop sign. The wind is picking up around me, and the thunder has begun to sound angry. Arcs of electricity travel along the surface of the clouds, light up the world in purples and white. And blues. So many shades of blue.
My father was a great man.
Straight ahead is the way home. To turn left is to head toward Lost Hill Memorial.
To turn right? To turn right is to go to the highway. To mile marker seventyseven.
I told myself I wasn’t going to go there anymore, that there was nothing left at the river for me to see. There was no longer any trace that a man had ever died at seventy-seven. Someone (I don’t know who) had put up a small white cross on the river’s bank shortly after the accident. I saw it for the first time four days after the funeral. It confused me. BIG EDDIE had been written in a childish scrawl across the horizontal bar. I knew what had happened there. I knew now where my father lay. I was certain that having two memorials would trap him, that he’d be stuck between the two, forced to return to the river over and over again, unable to leave.