Land of the Blind (17 page)

T
he cold returns at night in Spokane, on just about every night in the winter, even nights like this, when the sun has lied about early spring. At dusk the air loosens, the pooled snow begins to freeze, and the grass shines like it’s been sheeted with glass.

Across the street from the coffee shop the patrol officers have arrived. They carry the stolen TV from Pete Decker’s apartment, along with plastic baggies filled with pipes and baking soda and allergy medicine and batteries and enough cooked methamphetamine to keep Pete and his young friends stoned until the real spring comes. A handful of people watch from the street. Dupree stands among them self-consciously.

Pete sits quietly on the sidewalk, hands cuffed behind his back, trying to reach the dried blood on his nose with his shoulder. When he sees two cops carrying the stolen TV through the front door, Pete tries to get Caroline’s attention. “I was gonna give that back just like you said. You didn’t give me much time to finish your list.”

The father of the girl has arrived—a big man in work boots—and Caroline sees the girl cower in the lobby of the apartment building. Caroline pulls the father aside and points at Pete. “He’s facing assault charges for hitting your daughter,” she says, and then shakes her head. “Make sure you keep her safe so she can testify. Okay?”

The father nods.

Caroline shakes her head. “What kind of asshole would hit a girl?”

The father looks down. “I don’t know.”

“Yeah,” Caroline says. “Me neither.”

The girl emerges from the building with a patrol cop, and the father opens his passenger door.

From the sidewalk, Pete cranes his neck and tries to laugh. “We was just screwin’ around, huh, Amber? Tell the cops we was just screwin’ around. Amber?”

Caroline walks over and crouches next to Pete so that her body is between him and the girl. Pete pulls back a bit, but when he realizes she’s not going to hit him, he smiles. “You didn’t give me very much time.”

“No,” Caroline says. She continues to fill out her report for the patrol cops.

“I could’ve used a little more time,” Pete says.

“Sorry,” she says, without looking up from her report.

Amber leaves with her father. Pete watches their car pull away.

The patrol cops come and stand Pete up. He rises easily; he’s comfortable in custody, and the cuffs hang naturally on his wrists.

“Hey, I thought of something,” Pete says.

“Yeah?” On the report, Caroline checks boxes for assault, possession of drugs, possession with intent to deliver, possession of stolen goods, and resisting arrest.

“Yeah,” Pete says. “You asked if Clark ever had a beef with anyone. There was this one guy when we were kids.”

“Tommy Kane?” Caroline asks without looking up.

“I don’t know that guy. No, this guy was some kind of queer or something. He and Clark used to get into it at the bus stop. This kid named Eli Boyle.”

Caroline ignores him.

“I used to have to break up their fights.”

Two patrol cops grab Pete by his arms. “Yeah, I hope that helps you,” he says. The patrol cops lead Pete away to the car. “Maybe helps me out too?” They push his head down, but he’s done this often enough himself, and he slides easily into the backseat. “Maybe you tell my PO how I’m cooperating, okay? Okay?” The back passenger door closes and Caroline looks up to see Pete Decker settle back comfortably and nod to the cop in the front seat, as if he were Pete’s driver. The car pulls away.

Dupree joins her on the sidewalk. “You goin’ home now?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I’ll go down and get what the guy’s written so far and tell him we’ll pick it up on Monday.”

“Good,” Dupree says, and he looks down at his shoes. A decade ago, when she first started dreaming the old stuff—running away with him, a small town by a lake, kids—Alan’s bald spot was the size of a nickel. Now it is a cantaloupe. She wonders if she has aged as obviously, or with her, if it’s
mostly inside, if there’s a hollow spot, an emptiness that was a nickel and then a cantaloupe, and now is a beach ball.

He looks up from his shoes. “I was thinking about what you were saying. You know, about you and me? About that other world?”

“Forget it.” Maybe that’s what she’s imagining, a place where all her daydreams went, and the people she cared about—all the good things that seemed to be in the future but were now beyond her. She reaches out and squeezes his arm. “I was just talking out of my ass, Alan. I’m just tired. Go home. See your family.”

“Yeah, okay.” He starts to go. “So are you seeing someone?”

“Mm-hmm,” she says. “As a matter of fact, I am.”

“That’s great. What’s his name?”

“Clark,” she says.

“What’s he do?”

“Lawyer.”

Dupree smiles, a parent’s reaction upon hearing that a misfit daughter has met a lawyer, a relief to see she’s getting her life together. He seems genuinely happy for her. Or relieved that she’s not his responsibility anymore.

“That’s great, Caroline.”

“Yeah. We’ve been seeing a lot of each other. We talk. It’s good.”

“Good,” he says. He shuffles his feet once, reaches out and gives her a hug that she doesn’t return, and starts for his truck. She watches him drive away.

Then she walks to her own car and drives back to the cop shop. She parks in the turnout, figuring she’ll send the guy home and be back to her car in ten minutes or so. Inside the cave, the desk sergeant gives her a quick wave. “Good work down there. You can do the paper on Decker on Monday. You should go home. Get some rest.”

Dupree has called.

“Yeah,” she says. “I’m gonna do that. I just need to get something.”

The thought of bed is overpowering. And yet, still, something is nagging at her, a name she keeps seeing and hearing. There is a point of fatigue that brings apathy, and if you can push beyond it, she thinks, another point that brings clarity.

She punches in the code to get into the hallway, and then uses her key card to get into the Major Crimes office. She looks in on Clark; he’s still
writing, of course, leaning back in his chair now, balancing the legal pad against the edge of the table. She goes to her desk, to straighten up before she kicks Clark out and goes home for what’s left of the weekend. She takes the news stories and the list of contributors and is about to throw them in a desk drawer when clarity arrives.

She flips through the news stories until she finds it. The names of the two officers of the Fair Election Fund, the nonprofit PAC that laid out all that money on ads painting Clark Mason as a carpetbagger from Seattle. One of the officers is named Eli Boyle. She flips to the list of donors to Clark’s campaign: five thousand dollars from Eli Boyle. So he’s giving to the campaign and funding the ad campaign against it.

And what did Pete say:
Some kid named Eli Boyle.

She goes to the reverse directory. Eli Boyle lives on Cliff Drive. She thinks of the grand old houses on Cliff Drive, overlooking downtown. The reverse directory also lists Eli Boyle’s occupation. Founder, it reads, Empire Games.

That’s listed, too, in the donations, for twenty thousand dollars and fifteen thousand dollars. And she finds Empire Games in her notes from the interview with Susan (…
sold all the stock except Empire Games
…) and in the news story (…
he’s on the board of directors of a Spokane high-tech company called Empire Games
…). She looks up Empire Games in the reverse directory. Its address is the same as Eli Boyle’s. She writes it on a sheet of notebook paper, tears it out, and stands. She walks across the room and opens the door to the interview room. “How we doing, champ?”

“Great,” says Clark. “I’m almost done.”

“Okay,” Caroline says.

“What time is it?” he asks.

“Almost eight,” she says.

He smiles, that easy smile, and she knows how Susan Diehl must’ve felt, seeing him after all those years. “I can’t tell you how much this means to me,” he says. “Your having faith in me like this.”

“Okay,” Caroline says.

Outside, she is surprised by how dark and cold it has gotten. She starts her car and drives across the river gorge and into downtown, curving along Riverside with a handful of other cars, and makes her way down wide streets built at the turn of the twentieth century for thick lanes of traffic that were
long gone by the turn of the twenty-first. The buildings are stout and handsome—marble and brownstone, terra-cotta and brick. This city conceals more than some, its wealth and its power, its alliances and feuds, and even more, its grace. She catches a glimpse of the Davenport Hotel, lit up with construction lights. It’s supposed to reopen later this summer. Spokane is old, and it is beautiful like old things are, lit from within by nostalgia and hard times. But so many windows are still dark, so many storefronts vacant. She envies the optimists here, but how can you ignore the taped and painted windows, the boarded doors? How can you not feel like a whole city of people waiting for it to finally be over, a whole city tending a parent’s slow death?

She turns on Stevens and heads up the South Hill, once the concentrated prime real estate in Spokane. Cliff Drive is a short row of older houses at the first crest of the hill and Eli’s house is at the far west edge, not one of the mansions but a grand home nonetheless, a nice, two-story Tudor style. The lights are off. She parks in front and steps out of her car. From here downtown appears bright and busy, and she can see across the river, across the valley, to the hills that used to frame the north side of the city, until streets and buildings sprawled over those and the next hills too, and the next, where the money has been moving, where Susan Diehl is sitting on white furniture in her own half-million-dollar house on her own ledge, drinking martinis with Mr. Diehl. It’s a beautiful view, the lights like liquid coming down those ridges and the clouds set atop the valley, and she envies for a moment this Eli Boyle, with his high-tech money and his political donations and his Tudor house on this point, above all the shit.

Her feet clomp on the wooden porch. No one answers the doorbell. She presses a flashlight against the big picture window to cut the glare and peers inside. The living room is beautiful, dark wooded, with built-in hutches and cabinets, a fireplace, and a grand, curving staircase. But there is no furniture. She looks back to the front yard to see if she’s missed a For Sale or a Sold sign, but she hasn’t.

She walks along the wood porch to another window and peers in at a dining room, also empty. She walks all the way around the house, to the back, and looks in the kitchen. No appliances. Nothing. From the back porch she looks across the vast lawn. There is a garage, or a carriage house actually, on the side of the house. It is made of stone. River rock. A single set of dark
wooden stairs winds its way up to the second floor. There is an apartment on top, or an office. These windows are dark too, but a dull blue light comes from one of the windows, like that of a computer screen.

The cold grass crunches under her feet. A hand-lettered sign on the carriage house reads
EMPIRE INTERACTIVE
. She shines her flashlight on the sign, then climbs the steps to the second floor and gets a slightly different view of downtown Spokane, with some perspective. From here, you can get it all in your field of vision. That’s the thing. It really is a small city when you think about it, a city of coincidence and reoccurrence, of patterns and inescapable reputations. A man has dinner at a table next to his ex-wife in a restaurant he hasn’t been to in two years and he shakes his head. “That’s Spokane.” A woman sees an old boyfriend picking out china with his new girlfriend at the Bon Marché. “That’s just Spokane.” But don’t they also take some measure of security from that, too? Don’t they all believe they know everyone here, that they are safe and gentle and good to one another? The devil you know.

She once went six months without a dead body.

But as she reaches the top step she recognizes that faint smell and it breaks her heart a little. Six months. And when she tries the doorknob to the apartment above the carriage house, it turns easily in her hand. Caroline Mabry takes a breath and pushes through the door.

W
ho am I to describe Eli Boyle’s life, to trace its shape—the outside surfaces, the dates and places, the beginning and the end—when, admittedly, I never took the time to learn what existed inside that form, the truth of who Eli was, what drove him, what scared him, what he dreamed?

When this story comes out, the news media will not be so judicious, of course. They will sum up Eli’s life with one false cliché or another: rags to riches to rags again, or the impersonal nature of computers, or the profane irony of a love triangle. And perhaps these stories are true; I honestly don’t know what Eli believed, or what he thought about or—certainly—what his story
meant
. My own expertise lay simply in the horror of a shared adolescence, from its birth in humiliation at the Empire bus stop to its ending in betrayal in a wine-soaked room at the Davenport Hotel.

The world continued after the prom, of course, weightless days that left no imprint on me. True, my former friend Tommy Kane never spoke to me again, but that was of no great import—although I suspect it was he who threw my yearbook in the boys’ room toilet. (A janitor fished it out; even today, many of the nineteen pages on which I was photographed remain wrinkled and stained.)

Dana and I did not get together after the prom. I’d like to believe this was because of our concern for Eli’s feelings, but it likely had as much to do with a kind of inertia caused by the rigidity of our high school personas. At school, I was disheartened to see Dana retreat back into her loose clothing and pigtails, to see her stop wearing makeup. And I was equally surprised that my attraction to her could turn itself off so easily. I knew what lay under those baggy clothes, and yet she seemed too much like the old Dana, too bookish, too girlish, too logical in comparison to the curvy collections of fluff that I found attractive. I began to think of the girl in the hotel that night as someone else entirely. But this retraction wasn’t entirely my doing.
Something changed for Dana, too. She began to hesitate when she saw me, to blush when I said hi, to avoid me in the halls. It occurred to me that she might even see me as a mistake, as a blemish on her otherwise perfect school record, the B she never got. And when I read what she wrote in my wet yearbook (…
I’ll always care for you. Be good. Dana
), I knew I’d been kissed off.

Susan and I were finished, too. She didn’t sign my yearbook, but at school one of her friends handed me a note from her that read, in part,
We are fucking through
—although my teenage dyslexia transposed the last words to read
We are through fucking
—and I was understandably, or maybe just hormonally, heartbroken. I’d like to say that I was through with women built like Susan (all facade, no structural integrity), and that I had learned to appreciate the charming architecture of women like Dana (who am I kidding? There were none), but this is a story of weakness, not of strength.

I got no yearbook wishes from Eli. No notes or secondhand threats. I suppose I just stopped existing for him. I thought about apologizing, telling him that Dana and I weren’t going to see each other, that it had been a mistake, but I worried about making it worse, making it seem like I’d stolen something I didn’t even want, that I’d made out with his date just to spite him. While I tried to figure out what to say, one morning my shoes and jeans and T-shirts—the entire costume from Eli’s ill-fated remake—appeared on my back porch, neatly folded.

School ended before I figured out what to say to Eli, or to Dana. Of course I could’ve picked up the phone anytime, but something had given way in me. With college looming, the final hours of my childhood held little interest for me, like the last, hot afternoon of grade school—report cards mailed, desks cleaned, every eye on the needle-thin second hand making its glacial sweep around the clock face.

Days lost their mooring and drifted, banged one into the next, and I moved within them in a languid, sun-bleached daze. Summer bled out beneath my feet. My life took on the quality of nostalgia, sweet and distant and beyond change, my family receding into an album of memories. I crafted a schedule in which I rarely saw them, working as a dishwasher in a restaurant all night and sleeping most of the day. I was about to become the first in my family to go to college, and my parents were overly respectful of this; they kept their distance, unsure how to treat me. They fed me and housed
me but stayed out of my way, and I ate and rested and brooded like a climber the night before summit.

But Ben had no patience for this new state of affairs. He’d just turned sixteen, and though he remained small (a shade over five feet six inches tall, broom thin), he was dealing with sprouts of hair beneath his arms and on his chin, and the divining-rod erections that govern most sixteen-year-old boys. I’d always been a sort of tour guide through his adolescence, and now that it was finally getting good, Ben couldn’t understand where I’d gone, why I wouldn’t drive to the lake with him or shoot baskets or talk about girls—why I wouldn’t sit on the porch at twilight and laugh at things so familiar we barely needed to mention them.

“Let your brother sleep,” our mother would say as I lay in bed all afternoon, the pillow over my head, trying to breathe in long, sleepy rises and falls, pretending I didn’t know Ben was in my doorway. Eventually, he got the message; by summer’s end, he’d just nod when he saw me. When I left for college, he was camping with friends.

So that’s how my last summer as a child passed, in chrysalis hibernation, closed off to the people in my life, until the first day of September arrived and I emerged coolly into our driveway, a suitcase in each hand. My sisters hugged my hips. My mother cried.

My father handed me the keys to their old Dodge Colt, as if I’d just won a very bad game show. “I can’t pay for very much college,” he said. “But I can sure as shit get you there.”

“Thanks,” I said, and shook his hand. Then I climbed in the car.

I should have known, of course, that I was leaving behind unfinished business, not just with Ben, but with Eli and Dana. But all that summer, solitude had worked like a drug on me, and I happily allowed old intentions and obligations to fall away. I believed what TV teaches you—that change is only an episode away, the past is dead, and the only world is the one we’re in.

I drove my father’s car against the grain of late-summer clouds, drifting west on I-90, shadowing the river valley through the city of my birth, my arm resting on the open window, the wind rippling my sleeve. I crested Sunset Hill and saw Spokane recede in the rearview, a world beneath me, the last light glinting off the downtown buildings. The whole thing felt intimately familiar; the beginning of every daydream I’d ever had.

And that was it. September came and we did what people do—Dana and Eli and me. We went to college. More than a decade would pass before we would speak again.

Dana went to Stanford, just as she’d told everyone she was going to. She rarely came home from Palo Alto, but I heard through mutual friends that she joined a sorority and embraced the blossoming that she’d only flirted with in high school—tight skirts and torn jeans, filtered smokes and cheap well drinks. After this brief rebellion she cannily double-majored—she must’ve had a psychic student adviser—in management information systems and marketing. She became part of a group of Stanford grads and their friends that billed themselves as a sort of Bay Area technology salon—a tight community of young creative computer and business students who lived in and around Silicon Valley, “positioned,” as they would say, to be the vanguard of all that was coming, and to become quite wealthy in the next few years.

In that first decade after high school, there would be no canniness or blossoming or positioning for Eli. Certainly no wealth. He spent a year at community college but managed only a few credits before he dropped out to care for his mother, who had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Eventually, he and his mother moved to a downtown apartment to be closer to the hospital where she received medical care, and Eli gave up on college altogether and took a job processing film at a one-hour photo. I saw him once during this time—walking downtown, wearing a photo-booth apron, his nose in a book, plying the sidewalk with his bent-legged shuffle, shoulders rolled forward and glasses at the end of his nose. I was with two frat brothers, privileged sons of Mercer Island professionals, and I am sorry to admit (amid a thousand sorries) that I did not wave or stop to say hi or so much as slow down.

For me, those first two years of college had been nothing short of epiphanic, fulfilling in ways I didn’t know I could be fulfilled. Seattle was a land I had dreamed about without knowing it existed (let alone four hours away by car), and I happily left behind my hometown and its embarrassing, rigid poverty, its stunted ambitions, its daydreams that too often consisted of getting day shift at the aluminum factory. I thought of my home as a kind of childhood disease I had overcome, and I learned to despise it the way a thankless child despises his uncultured family.

The campus of the University of Washington opened for me like a pop-up
book. Backpacked and Ray-Banned, I marched in Top-Siders and polo shirts with twenty thousand other soldiers of reinvention, from class to class in vast lecture halls, to intramural games along the lake, used bookstores on the Ave, keg lines in the district, breakfast joints in Wallingford, bars in Belltown. I crabbed and kayaked, rock-climbed and mountain-biked, threw Frisbees on cold beaches, drank Canadian beer, and learned to have sex with bulimia-thin girls in dorm room bunk beds and sorority house study carrels (though I never forgot my lessons with Susan, and was always on the lookout for a more vehicular hump). I studied. Got A’s. Networked. Brown-nosed.

But most of all I ran for things. I started slowly, filing unopposed for sergeant at arms in my freshman dormitory (“Make it Mason!”) until, by my junior year, I was in full campaign mode—vice president of my fraternity (and then a shoo-in for the top spot my senior year) and president of the campus chapter of the Young Democrats, as well as a lesser officer in six other organizations, everything from Junior Toastmasters to the Young Sierra Club. I fell in with a group of similar alpha achievers, and we worked our young résumés and our grade point averages with the same fervor that we chased tail.

At some point during my sophomore year, I stopped thinking of myself as being from Spokane. I was part of the torrent of people who were just then beginning to flood Seattle with our affections and affectations, with our arrogance: an unwitting conspiracy of transplants and entrepreneurs, hikers, bikers, and seekers, the regionally hip—a cult of casually dressed devotees of grubby Northwest realism. Over the next twenty years, we would ruin all that we found charming: old flop hotel lounges and Irish bars and Pioneer Square taverns. We discovered smoky dives filled with drunken hobos and cranky Norwegian fishermen and drank and smoke amid them, sucking their genuineness until we looked up and saw the hobos were software engineers and the fishermen bicycle messengers and hummus was on the menu. Coffee and chowder and punk trios became brand names and mall kiosks and dull pop. Tucked-booth greasy-spoon breakfast joints became tour-guided facsimiles of tucked-booth greasy-spoon breakfast joints, and only by listening closely (“We’ll have the whole wheat goat cheese pancakes, the six-herb flan, and two cappuccinos”) could a person tell the difference. We turned every gas station into a coffee shop, and by the time I left Seattle you could have four hundred flavors of coffee, but you couldn’t find a decent gallon of gas.

We were beginning to love the place to death.

“Aren’t you homesick?” my mother used to ask on the phone, at the outset of my affair with Seattle. Later, she was more direct. “Are you ever coming home?”

But how could I leave, even for a weekend? The sun might come out.

Spokane was only four hours away and yet it faded from my memory. I came home only three times each my freshman and sophomore years. “I’m really swamped” was my standard response to my mother’s entreaties. This was the advantage of being the first in my family to ever go to college; they had no balance to my stories of round-the-clock studying, of mandatory poetry readings and guest lectures and spirit bonfires.

When I did come home I felt increasingly detached from Spokane, and from my parents, whom I lectured with the arrogance of a transplant, with the zeal of a religious convert. Every other sentence out of my mouth began, “The problem with this place—” I suggested that Seattle’s vitality revealed Spokane’s failings: its aging population, its economic and political intractability, its lack of imagination and unrelieved shabbiness. “Spokane is Kmart,” I famously said at Christmas dinner once. “Seattle is Nordstrom.”

Mom and Dad were so proud of my A’s and my smooth transition to college that they indulged my bouts of civic self-importance. My sisters, too, sat through my lectures. The only person who didn’t put up with this shit was my brother Ben, who rolled his eyes at my newfound civic pretentiousness and missed no opportunity to mock me: “Spokane is a cup of piss,” he said that same Christmas. “Seattle is a two-dollar cup of piss.”

My parents were just beginning to worry about Ben during this time, that his unleavened cynicism was more than just a phase. He had graduated from high school and grown into a thin, caustic young man; with his short hair and raw features, he looked like a British soccer fan. He had abandoned his smoking jacket and pipe for a mode of self-expression he called “enlightened laziness,” which consisted mostly of sitting around my parents’ house in flannel pajamas, skimming old philosophy books, playing Atari, and drinking red wine out of Slurpee cups. When my father laid down the law and told him to enroll in college, Ben disrespectfully declined. He found an apartment and got a job mopping hospital corridors at night so that his days would remain open for sitting around in his pajamas, reading Nietzsche and Sartre, and drinking red wine out of Slurpee cups.

That fall—it was my junior year—every phone call home quickly devolved into a discussion of Ben’s malaise. “He needs to get out of Spokane,” I said. “It breeds apathy.” But my mother convinced me that at least some of it had to do with Ben missing me, that he was aping my slovenly behavior during my last summer at home.