I didn’t want to be lying in Ed Blake’s bed again, but that’s where I was. We’d just had bad sex. He was on top, missionary position. He came, I didn’t, and as soon as his dick shrank, I pulled it tight against my clitoris. “Hey, that doesn’t feel good.”
I rubbed his penis against me until I came too, sharp and hard. Afterward, I said, “See? We can always have sex that excludes each other. Then we won’t get so tangled up.”
I sat up on my knees and squinted down at him. He was a ridiculous man, with his stubbly face and bulging gut. I leaned over and slapped his face.
He hit me back pretty hard, and my cheek burned.
“I’ll bet your government buddies have known all along where Joe Magnus is, haven’t they?”
“I think I’m going to need a drink for this,” he said.
“You’ll need more than a drink.” I tried to hit him again, but he grabbed my arm.
“I don’t like this stuff,” he said.
“You already knew my brother is alive, you fucking liar.”
He turned me loose and raised up on his elbows. “Burns is alive? How do you know?”
“Joe Magnus’s sister told me.”
“How would she know?”
“I trusted you, Blake. How could you do this?”
“I haven’t lied to you, Ellen. I did not know your brother was alive, and I’m not sure I believe it yet. Who is this woman you’re talking about? What did she say? Nobody I’m in contact with at the FBI still has Royce Burns on their radar. They insist they killed him at Whidbey Island. I’ve told you the truth about that.”
“Could the FBI’s DNA evidence be wrong? Could they have faked it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what the hell has happened.”
“And who is in his fucking grave?”
He clutched my arm so hard it started to go numb. “Places like BATF, probably the FBI too, I’ve told you, they have pockets inside them. Who’s going to root them out? Some of those guys were contemporaries of Hoover, and he thought a race war was coming way back then.”
I sat beside him and turned my back, clutching my knees as if we were in a soap opera.
“I’m getting a beer,” he said. He pulled on his boxer shorts and left the room. “You want a Coke? You want a six-pack of Coke?”
When he returned to the bedroom, I was fully dressed. “I can’t do this anymore, Blake. I’m sorry I let this happen again.”
“You could have fooled me.”
“It’s not the sex.”
“Then what is it?”
When I didn’t answer, he put his beer on the end table by the bed and began to dress without looking at me.
“I wouldn’t mind some coffee,” I said.
For a while he disappeared to his kitchen, where he made quesadillas with beans and cheese and salsa and leftover chicken from a carcass in the refrigerator. We sat out on his porch to eat it. Even in the shade it was too hot, but I didn’t want to go back inside his house. “You have a good view,” I said, as if I’d never seen it before. I’d left Charleston at 5:30 A.M., and I was so exhausted that the wood grain on the floor started moving.
He said, “Can I ask you now about what Magnus’s sister told you?”
“Not much more than I already said. She hasn’t seen Royce herself, but the way her brother stays so furious, I know Royce can’t be dead. Basically, she just confirmed what I already knew in my gut.”
“But when he was declared dead, didn’t Joe Magnus hear about that?”
“Lily said that Magnus—she calls him Joey—claims that was all bullshit the feds concocted to screw around with some men who belong to a local militia. They buried ‘Royce,’ and then the FBI or BATF or whoever it was gathered information just by paying attention to whatever idiots showed up at Royce’s grave. I don’t know if I told you this, but a few months after we buried whatever that was, people started coming to the grave and leaving miniature Confederate flags. Then a couple of Saturday nights about a dozen of them went out there to sing ‘Dixie’ and recite some doggerel poetry, and pray for the future of the white race.”
“How do you know about this? Were they arrested?”
“No, but my cousin Logan told me about it. Logan’s not a militia guy, he’s just a Confederate reenactor. I mean, he’s not out there in the woods training for combat, but he does own his own cannon. He’s a furious sentimentalist about the Civil War. I don’t know why he told me. I ran into him in a cafeteria. Maybe he was just trying to piss me off. I mean irritate me.”
“Ellen, the militia thing is becoming an increasing problem. It’s hard to know where the breakdown in Oklahoma was. There’s a lot speculation that BATF could have prevented the bombing but somehow dropped the ball. In the eighties, all the terrorist organizations like the Silent Brotherhood and the Aryan Army and the Posse Comitatus supposedly got stopped, but now we’re getting these vigilante terrorists like McVeigh. He probably wasn’t operating alone. One of my more cynical friends thinks that the rise of the white militias is a response to what happened at Ruby Ridge and at Waco, because, in those cases, white people were the ones the government killed.”
“Can you imagine if we had black or Hispanic militias? Black or brown people marching around in the woods training with machine guns?”
There was a silence.
“So,” I finally said, “are you ever going to tell me what’s really on your mind? What really brought you to Gallup, New Mexico?”
He reached over, took my hand, and rubbed the back of it. The sensation was not pleasant.
Everybody has a story, and Ed Blake was dragging his behind him too. Although he had described much of his professional history, he had said little about his marriage and daughters. I knew his time in New Mexico had been hastily constructed: the kit log house, the unimportant job, the solitude he’d chosen. “It’s beautiful out here,” he said. “Peaceful. I like the dry air.”
He waited so long that I wondered if he would be able to tell me. Finally, I pulled my hand away because he was hurting me.
“Nothing as original as the Burns family. I lost my son to leukemia when he was in the eleventh grade. I didn’t handle it well.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say. “What was his name?”
“His name was Edward, like mine.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Four years.”
“So, when you showed me pictures of your daughters in your living room, you chose not to show me pictures of your son?”
“I can’t keep pictures of him where I would have to walk by them.”
“Are you on decent terms with your wife about all this now? What about your daughters?”
“No, I lied about that too.”
After he found out his son was terminally ill, Blake told me, he fell in love with, got obsessed with, a rookie on his own force. Her name was Olivia, and she was not much older than his daughters. What attracted him, he thought now, was that nothing bad had ever happened to her. She had always wanted to be a cop, got her degree in law enforcement and forensics, intended to work her way up, and could run a five-minute mile. Nothing bad had ever happened to her, and when he was with her he felt as if nothing bad had ever happened to him either. At the hospital, she’d been out of uniform in the lobby, on her way to visit a friend who’d just had her breasts enlarged, and within ten minutes there he was, the chief of police, staring down into a bowl of soup in the cafeteria while this young woman patted his arm as if he were an old man. “I was completely undone. I did every slimy thing you can imagine. Even the night of our son’s funeral I spent with her.”
“So you abandoned your daughters the way Royce did Ruby?”
“No, no, I didn’t denounce them or tell them they were abominations or anything like that. But, yes, I abandoned my wife, who surely didn’t deserve it. I left her in her own hell the night our son died. The girls had come home from college, so I told myself they would be more comfort for their mother, she was better off with them. I doubt that was true. And, of course, they needed me there for them. But I think I was only able to stand any of it because of Olivia. I ruined her career. A situation like that follows a woman much more than it follows a man.”
“What happened to her?”
“She got married. She’s still a cop, but she’ll be writing tickets for the rest of her life.”
“And you have a log cabin in the middle of nowhere.”
“And an ex-wife who cleaned my clock financially. But I deserved that.”
“What’s the situation with your daughters?”
“They may have begun to forgive me, to some degree.”
“So, Blake, I’m beginning to understand our connection better. My past is full of things I can’t take back. When something’s done, you can’t undo it, even if you’re sorry.”
“Right. You can’t unring a bell. So here we are.”
“One of the AA promises is, ‘We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.’ Can you imagine thinking like that?”
“That’s crap.”
“It’s not crap, but as long as we’re telling each other our secrets, here’s another piece of my mine. My brain doesn’t work quite right. When I was about five years sober, I began to see imaginary kids following me around. Three or four of them at first. Then half a dozen. A lot of therapy later, I began to understand that pieces of my psyche had split off and were confronting me. I’m lucky I wasn’t hospitalized, but it wasn’t schizophrenia. It was just vivid and scary as hell.”
He looked relieved that I had changed the subject instead of trying to find a way to offer him comfort. “What made it stop? Has it stopped?”
“The kids told me a bunch of stuff I didn’t want to know, and then faded out. But every once in a while, one of them pops back up. What I mean is, my wiring’s not right, and whatever was funky got exacerbated by all the drugs I took.”
“Psychedelics?”
“I was a garbage head. If a drug or a drink would make you feel different, I wanted it. Except for heroin. Those scare-kids-straight movies in high school worked for me. But another thing that stays weird for me is metaphors. Metaphors become like real passageways in my head. I mean, metaphors can just be plain old metaphors, or they can make me feel as if I’ve stuck my arm in too deep and pulled out a living fish.”
“Can you give me an example?”
“That is an example.”
“Another example?”
“Okay, when I take off my mother’s makeup at night, I use these little Q-tips to remove her eye shadow, but if I look too long at her eyelashes they can start looking like a burned forest, or they can turn green and become a sugarcane field. I can smell it, but I’m still sitting there taking off her eye shadow. Later, when I’m by myself, I can go back into the cane field because I like it there a lot.”
“Is it always a cane field?”
“No, of course not, the cane field is an example. Cane fields aren’t good places for walking.”
“I guess I really don’t understand.”
To temper my snippy reaction, I said, “Be grateful about that. But I suspect that a lot of people’s minds work like mine. They get it trained out of them or forced out of them, and then sometimes they go crazy. If I’m really tired, the physical world can turn translucent. A gauzy curtain I can see through. Am I scaring you yet?”
“Maybe. What do you see?”
“A reddish gold landscape. Sandstone. Big rectangular stones on the horizon. I don’t know. Words that describe it slip around.”
“It sounds a lot like New Mexico.”
“I hope it’s not New Mexico.”
“Maybe I understand better now why you’re so afraid of your brother.”
“I may be eccentric, Blake, but I’m not morally deranged, and I manage to stay in the real world most of the time. I don’t think Royce was ever in the real world again once those snakes crawled up his legs. Me, I only have to stay sober in AA and try to get regular sleep. As you can imagine, I saw a lot of doctors when the imaginary kids started showing up. The medical conclusion was that I have a sleep disorder. I think that’s pretty funny too, because what the fuck is sleep? We spend a third of our lives doing something we can’t even remember. The truth is, I wouldn’t trade anything for the way my mind works. Royce’s problems are very different. And, yes, I suppose my deepest fear is that I’m like him. What if one day diamond snakes start crawling up my legs?”
We were sitting in the near dark; it had been afternoon when we’d emerged. Only the frame of the porch was visible against the star-scattered horizon.
“You’re not crazy, Ellen. You’re just very intense.”
“Yes, I’ve heard that before, but only as a criticism.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever felt as connected to anyone as I do to you.”
I stood up, wanting to leave, but he did too and moved to stand very close to me. I could smell him and feel him, but I understood now that we were only looking for redemption, and my distance from him held steady.