You could not manage a branch of law enforcement in a county of this size without being shrewd and careful and a politician of some deftness. Dobbs was a man who had done any number of small favors to a great many people and kept a constant tally of what was owed him. He cared greatly about his elections, and he cared about city taxes and levies, budgets that shrank or expanded or infringed upon his staff’s capabilities or law enforcement in the state in general. He was a Republican in the sense that people in his county viewed Democratic anything as soft on crime and criminals, especially Democratic-leaning sheriffs, so when asked, he was a Republican and that was that. Mostly, though, it hardly mattered to him. The day-to-day mattered: paperwork and performance reviews and the tread of his deputies’ boot heels on the hallway floors, the sharp clip of cruiser doors slamming shut in the parking lot outside his window. That was politics to him.
Junie, though. Junie had lived and died a Democrat. Staunch and fierce. A believer in social responsibility, in society’s innate indebtedness to one another. June loathed Reagan not only for what she claimed was his murderous bravado, his foolishness, but because even without the assassination attempt on his life in August of ’80, that deadly club that the man would wield for years and years, he would have won the election anyway. By 1980, the American people felt like Carter was just too goddamned soft on the nuclear question (among most other things) and the Russians just kept gnashing their teeth and puffing up their chests and toeing the line. First Brezhnev and, by the time June died, Andropov. It was a dangerous time, and the American people were afraid, and they were tired of being afraid, and tired of weakness, and Reagan in 1980 had strode in like a cowboy-savior come to life from one of his films, a stoic, grizzled man covered in trail dust and spattered in blood. The relief that people felt—most people—was palpable. Save us, they said, from this doughy-hearted peanut farmer.
That was what had irked Junie: that he’d already been winning in the polls. Then, on Saturday, August 23, 1980, roughly two months after becoming the Republican nominee for President of the United States of America, Reagan was shot twice on the heat-softened tarmac of the Peachtree-Dekalb Airport in Atlanta, Georgia. It was 98 degrees in the shade and John Hinckley, Jr. (who had by then already given up on stalking Carter, knowing even then which way the political winds would blow), got within twelve feet of Reagan and fired six rounds from his little Röhm .22 revolver. Six rounds in less than two seconds. Saying it out loud—boom boom boom boom boom boom—took more time than doing it.
All but one bullet found a target.
Junie always said the Republicans might as well have put the man on salary.
Six shots and then that old familiar chaos: madness and bellows and a chorus of bodies hurling themselves to scorching blacktop. The familiar names: Reagan’s campaign manager, Carl Dwyer, took a round in the skull, and his foreign policy rep Tom Teer was grazed on the neck. Secret Service agent Bernard McCleary took one in the guts as Special Agent in Charge John Wanatabe tackled Hinckley. The fourth shot was the one that went wild. It was a shit-show. But it was the last two rounds (Wanatabe had even cinched his hands around Hinckley’s wrist by then) that were imbued with the freaky, unnatural luck that would forevermore leave the conspiracy nuts whispering.
The fifth round took off Reagan’s left thumb as neatly as if someone had lopped it off with a pair of fabric scissors, leaving a simple ragged hole centered with a knob of bone. That same round then hit his ribcage and traveled up the pectoral muscle to shatter his collarbone before exiting.
And the last round? Lucky number six?
The last bullet entered beneath Reagan’s armpit, tumbling through bone and tissue, finally coming to rest woefully near the heart.
He lived (“Of course he did!” June would say. “There are social services to dismantle! Missiles to build!”), and poor, bumbling Carter should have just conceded the race right there. Reagan, wounded and gasping, soon became the people’s knight, bloodied but unbowed. The bullet, so said his running mate, George H.W. Bush, in a hushed press conference that afternoon, was lodged too close to the soft tissue of the heart to be removed. To do so, Bush said gravely, might kill him. His speech was lush with pauses, the click of cameras in those silences so dense and frenzied they sounded like the hissing of some great reptile.
Reagan was still bandaged up in November when it was announced that he had won the election in one of the most marked landslides in Presidential history, seventy-five percent of the popular vote, and carrying 46 states. His first speech to the public after taking the oath of office included those oft-repeated lines: “The American people, and the world, have suffered too long under the soft and, at times, misguided conceit of diplomacy. There are times in history in which diplomacy fails a nation, fails a people. When it places a country and its citizens in grave danger. With me as your President, that changes today. We live in the greatest and most powerful, benevolent nation on earth, and with that power, and that generosity, there lies a willingness to act and a staunch refusal to kowtow to tyranny and evil.” Then he held aloft his ruined hand and you could hear the roar of the crowd like something ageless, the same sound heard down millennia of bloodied, brutal politicking. (“They yelled like that in the Coliseum, David, when the senators of Rome threw people to the lions,” June would say dourly from the couch. Dobbs would just smile.)
She had loathed the man from the start. The night of his inauguration speech she had set her knitting down and pointed at the television with one of her needles. “That man,” she spat, venomous, “wants to start a war so badly he tastes radium when he takes a shit.” Which hardly made sense, of course. But June hardly ever swore, and she was furious, and with Dobbs’s tumbler halfway to his lips and his eyebrows raised, he turned to his wife. June’s mouth was trembling, and a moment later the two of them had laughed so explosively and suddenly that the dog woke with a yelp at Dobbs’s feet. June had cried laughter, wiping tears away with her thumb. Dobbs had been bent over in his armchair, literally slapping his knee, breathless, almost with a kind of panic. The two of them slowly gathered their breath again and the rest of the night there would be brief bouts of mad laughter, no provocation, but frequent enough so that the dog finally had risen and gone to sleep elsewhere.
After that, she called him Ronnie Radium when she saw him on television, and usually left the room.
• • •
Dobbs’s house was four miles north of town. Flanked by big pines on all sides, one arrived by a long and curving driveway that branched off from 101. It was practically their own road. The property consisted mostly of thick plots of Douglas fir and rolling patches of sand-clotted crabgrass, though he and the dog, back when her eyesight was good enough, would sometimes find surprisingly large swaths of stinking, knee-high standing water that he supposed qualified as bogs. They’d bought the place a year after he and June married in ’53. Dobbs was freshly home from Korea and nearly everything between Riptide and Lincoln City had been standing timber and brackish, rock-hewn scrub that ran straight to the cliffs bracing the beaches below. Beautiful country in its own right, but windswept and forlorn, too. Back then, Riptide had been a town of four thousand souls, or so.
The house had been too big for them. Two stories tall, four bedrooms, two baths, as well as an attic and basement. A detached garage held the history of Dobbs’s half-hearted attempts at hobbies, at finding something besides police work to fill his days: model building, golf, fishing and camping equipment, his-and-hers skis leaning like robbers in one corner. It was too big for them but June had had the mumps as a child and, as a result, could not have children. They had talked in their thirties of adopting, but it was distant and vague talk; they had always found solace in each other, in their work. He had the station and she had the library. For thirty years, June had sanded off the harshness in his heart, had smoothed the jagged edges inside him. Made him laugh. Excited him. In bed, after they made love, they would lie together and talk, him pressed against her ass, the scooped curve of her back, his hand cupping her breast. He had taken great solace in it throughout the years; children or not, he had always been grateful of their intimacy, a little awed by her. He heard other men complain of their wives, of their boredom or frigidity, towards June he felt none of that. The opposite of that.
They bought the house and got a puppy, an Irish setter, and when that one died they had gotten another one. It was their third dog that now greeted him as he opened the front door, and she was old and mostly deaf and nearly blind. An arthritic female Golden Retriever named Lea that, since June’s death, would occasionally rise and walk around the house, navigate the many empty rooms, her poor eyes marbled and almost beautiful with cataracts. Nosing the corners of each room she passed through. Looking and looking for June.
The land was different now, too. Clusters of houses, whole neighborhoods, had risen through the decades. Businesses and warehouses and gas stations seeping out from the heart of the town like blood from a wound. Running alongside 101 like an infection. The inside of the house was the same as it had ever been, changes so incremental as to be practically unnoticeable. It had been too big for them but together they had managed to fill it, hadn’t they? Dobbs’s recliner fuzzy and pilled at the headrest, the blond wood floors, June’s seashells clustered on the mantle above the fireplace, the kitchen’s pale green Formica countertops glittering like they held trapped chips of gold. They had made such an expansive space smaller with their closeness, the singularity of their living.
Now his footsteps took on the echo of a mausoleum as he stepped inside and dropped his keys on the kitchen counter and slung his jacket over the back of a high-back chair. He put his holstered revolver next to that morning’s unwashed coffee cup and Lea came toward him, grinning and silent, not even barking anymore at his arrival. She grazed his palm with her wet nose, then licked the back of his hand and pressed her flank against him heavily, as if grateful for the support.
He fed her and then turned the television on in the den, the sudden brash noise and light an envoy against another night’s worth of silence and darkness. Beneath the television’s laugh track he could hear the wind among the eaves, the sharpened corners of the house. Dinner was served in a sectioned Styrofoam tray, warm from the microwave: gray turkey in its thin gruel of gravy, tiny cubes of carrots, and applesauce. He ate in his recliner; June would have shuddered. He sectioned an apple with his pocketknife as he watched the news and when he was done he threw the Styrofoam tray in the trash and poured himself another drink, padding back to the living room in his socks. There were those moments—a hundred of them a day at first and now maybe only slightly less—when he kept waiting for the sound of her car in the driveway, the headlights to wash across the wall of the living room. Or he would be watching television and look over, expecting to see her in her spot on the couch, cross-legged on the cushions as she sipped a glass of wine, her knitting in her lap, reading glasses perched on her head. Books in a stack near the lamp. He found himself doing it again tonight, and finally stood up and turned on both of the room’s lamps and the overhead fixture, as well. In the dining room, he turned on the hanging chandelier so that it shone through the doorway into the living room. The place was surfeited with light now and Lea raised her shaggy head from her paws and looked at him.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said.
M*A*S*H* was on, a show that had played itself out any number of years back but one Dobbs still found comfort in, and that was what it was all about, right? The laughs were forced and spare; it was the familiarity that he wanted. The known. He went into the kitchen and poured another Rum and Coke.
As he walked into the living room again he looked over at the empty couch and then veered away from his recliner so suddenly he surprised himself. He sat down in June’s spot, the same room from a different view, a collection of strange angles. The way June had seen their home for so long, so often. To one side was the television, to the other his recliner and, beyond that, the fireplace, the bookshelf full of her novels and his history books on the war. A stack of old crossword puzzle booklets lay in a wicker basket next to the end table. Rain pattered against the window behind his head.
Dobbs sipped his drink. “Come here,” he said, and patted the cushion next to him. Lea raised her head again, her rheumy eyes searching him out. June had never let the dog on the couch, or the bed.
“Come here,” he said again, and the dog rose gingerly on quavering legs. A labored process. Old dog, old man. He had to help her up onto the couch, but then they passed a number of hours that way. Sitcoms, a crime drama, and then the ten o’clock news—Ronnie Radium and the Soviets in their ceaseless ballet. The dog’s head in his lap, the warmth of it, the resolute curve of her skull beneath his hand.
• • •
It was past midnight when he entered the bedroom. He’d made no effort yet to remove her things. How could he? Her nightgown still hung on a hook on the bathroom door, frail as smoke. Her slippers, one tiered slightly on top of the other, still at the end of the bed. But June’s scent was fading after three months and there was some part of him that was afraid to remove any object lest his overall memory of her somehow become diminished because of it.
Lea, emboldened by her time on the couch, stood in the doorway with her head lowered, seeking him out in the room, casting her head this way and that. As if she was both seeking permission to enter and aware of the intimacy of his next act, what he was about to do. Dobbs had taken a pair of the pillows from the couch—the long ones, which June had always insisted on calling “body pillows”—and laid them end to end on her side of the bed. (And it was her side—they had slept this way for three decades and Dobbs still slept on the left. He would do so until he died, he was sure.)
He took all the blankets and sheets off the bed now, piled them on the bureau. He took one of June’s nightgowns from her dresser—one that still smelled at least of the detergent they used, the fabric softener—and laid it on the bed, placing the pillows inside the nightgown. Lea was a sentinel in the doorway, unmoving, her long shadow falling across the carpet. He laid that creation, those pillows in their cocoon of nightgown (misshapen and strange and so unlike his wife’s body), and placed it on June’s side of the bed and remade the bed then, tucking the edges in tightly. He turned off the light and Lea chuffed softly and Dobbs stood in the dark looking at the bed. The rising clefts and valleys, the shape under the blanket.
It looked nothing like her body. It looked like nothing alive.
He disrobed and masturbated quickly in the shower while his head was a dark void full of heat and a great yawning expanse. His blood sang quietly with rum. After he was done he stayed for some minutes under the shower looking at his wrinkled, calloused hands. The yellowed cracked talons of his toenails. An old man. He cleaned himself, toweled off and padded into the bedroom and found Lea asleep at the foot of the bed, her head resting on June’s slippers. He was struck for a moment with the surety that he could not go on. Could not continue any more. And yet. He put on his pajama bottoms, checked that the telephone at his bedside had a dial tone, went to the kitchen counter in the dark and got his revolver and put it in his bedside bureau.
He drifted to sleep with the dead weight of the pillows against his chest. The worn fabric of June’s nightgown soft against his arm. The cheap and hollow comfort of it all.