Piper (16 page)

Well, here I am, Dad, ready to drink your ink
.

I waited in the back and accepted the pats on the shoulder as people filed by, shaking their heads and muttering. “Who would have thought?”

Louise Mead was the last one to leave and whatever she was saying to Dad she punctuated it with finger pokes into the space between them.
Pow. Pah. Pow
. Unrelieved nicotine anxiety. I could imagine what she was saying.
Tom, put some distance between you and that man. You're the boss here. You're the one everyone looks up to
. She had a roughness about her that let her cut through the crap. Dad had been reduced to head nodding. Louise's parting gesture was a sharp snap of her fingers.
Just say jump, Tom, and we'll ask how high
.

On the way out, she brushed close to me and whispered, “I softened him up for you, sugar.”

After Louise closed the door, the only sound was the hum of the computer, interrupted by an occasional gurgle as the processor bit something off and swallowed. Sometimes I'd heard Dad turn on the portable radio on his credenza and listen to National Public Radio, but right then I wanted the country music station, something bluesy and overdone to break the suction of silence between us. He was leaning against the edge of the desk again with both his legs and arms crossed. He wasn't coming to me; I had to go to him. I let the newspaper flap across the backs of the chairs like a playing card against bike spokes as I walked slowly toward his desk. I reminded myself that in this room I was his employee, so didn't he owe me the same explanation he'd given everyone else?

“Now you know why I had to proofread the front page.” His voice was kind. This was going to go better than I'd thought.

“You were in a pretty awkward spot, huh?” I rolled the paper up and slid it back and forth through the loop I'd made with my thumb and index finger.

“I couldn't not report it. Nobody's beyond the reach of the public's right to know.”

I had to think about that for a moment. With my dad, I'd learned to operate in a different gear. Maybe it was his Jesuit training.
The universe isn't just a jumble of accidents, Piper. There's an order in the essence of things, even in the intangibles like fear or jealousy. It's our job to discover that order
. If you didn't get off on principles and syllogisms, you wouldn't understand my dad. That's just who he was. But, hey, this one was going in the right direction. I was part of the public so didn't I have a right to know? I was feeling giddy again, the same rush I'd had in Ned's when I first saw the headline. Dad hadn't even mentioned my truancy. I put my foot up on the closest chair and leaned on my knee so we could talk man-to-man.

“Who was the kid, Dad?”

He brushed his hand in the direction of my leg. “Don't put your shoes on the furniture.”

“Oh … sure.” I stood up and resumed reaming the finger loop with my newspaper.

“The bench-press rules don't allow us to disclose names of minors in a situation like this.”

“Did you tell
them
?” I gestured to the empty couch and chairs.

“Piper, I'm not going to budge on this one.”

I wanted to cuss, but instead I just crammed the end of the paper into the palm of my hand like I was snuffing out a cigarette.
The bench-press rules don't allow us
? He sounded like the Pope. “So much for the public's right to know,” I said.

“Don't get cute.”

I shook my head in frustration. “Dad, this affects me. It affects us. What did he do?”

“He didn't
do
anything. Didn't you hear what I said? This is an accusation …”

“Okay, okay, what was he
alleged
to have done?”

He stood up, uncrossed his arms, and gripped the lip of the desk. His lids tightened down over the tops of his eyes. “Okay, you asked and I'm going to tell you. This is in the charging affidavit. If you went to the courthouse, you could read this.” His Adam's apple moved up, then down, as he gulped. “They say he sodomized a boy … you know what sodomy is?” I nodded, my mouth too dry to speak. “There are multiple counts. They're saying it was a predatory relationship. It's hard even to say it.” He wiped away the start of a tear under one eye and took a deep breath. “Now you know more than they do.”

“I know how you feel about the Carlisles, Dad, but … isn't there a silver lining in all this?”

“Hah!” He stood up and went around behind his desk. I knew he was about to kick me off to school and I had lots more to say. It might be a long time before we worked ourselves back to this same ledge together.

“The paper won't sell, will it … with this kind of cloud?”

He lifted things off the desk and flopped them back down. We'd never discussed the argument I'd overheard between him and Carlisle and I half-expected he'd tell me to leave it alone the way he told me to take my foot off the chair. “It was only an inquiry, but yes it could affect a sale. How'd you know about that?”

“You know, loose lips in the doghouse.”

“If he goes down it's because I let him go down.”

“That's crazy, Dad. You're not his guardian. Let him take the flop.”

He coupled his hands together like a train hitch. “John Carlisle and this paper are like that. He needs someone in his corner.”

This wasn't making sense. Even the Catholic Church had corrupt popes, but the institution lived on. Why didn't Dad let go? John Carlisle was dead weight in a leaky life raft. If Dad held on, he was going down with him. “He doesn't need
you
. He needs a psychiatrist.”

The veins in the side of Dad's neck engorged and he clenched his fist like an Irishman in a pub who'd just been called a candy ass. “I've worked for the Carlisles for twenty years. The roof over our heads was paid for with Carlisle money. I'm going to investigate this thing myself! I'll find out what the truth is. And when I do, I'll print it and let the chips fall where they may!” He slapped his day calendar down on the desk so hard that a pencil jumped. He seemed crazed by the whole thing and what he was saying sickened me. I'd always thought of John Carlisle as someone Dad had put up with. The paper worked in spite of Carlisle, not because of him. In his heart, I always thought Dad must have despised him more than anyone in Stampede. The Scanlons were self-made, the Carlisles were inherited, surviving on someone else's money, someone else's sweat. Scanlon sweat. But the more Dad talked, the more he was pulling us into the same tent as the Carlisles.

“If you're going to take sides, why don't you take Mom's side?”

He spun his head around. “What's she got to do with it?”

“Why didn't you investigate her death?” I was strangling the newspaper in my hand, resisting the temptation to throw it at him and quit his damn paper. I didn't know exactly where I was going with this. It was still murky and I hadn't had the chance to figure it out yet, but there was a connection here. It was the part I'd hoped Dad would help me with. I'd visualized us on the same page, him sitting me down, marshaling his formidable deductive skills, and telling me how this exculpated Mom.

“I'm not going to stand in my own office and argue with you about John Carlisle. The truth will win out. It always does.” He turned away from me and started fussing with the papers on his desk. He'd gone back into his journalist's vestments. We were back at day one of life after Mom, when my life with Dad had really begun, and he was trying to shield me with ignorance again. Why couldn't he run our relationship the same way he ran the newspaper? The truth was king for the paper, but it was a thief between us.

It was mid-morning when I left Dad's office and the repair and sales vehicles gathered for the donut break had filled the street in front of Marge's—Cascade County PUD, U.S. West, Washington Natural Gas, and the Stampede Police. Marge poured coffee for one of the booths by the window and mouthed me a greeting through the steamed up glass. I took my hand out of my jacket and waved back. She was smiling, pleased to be busy. There was a rack next to her cash register for newspapers and I guessed for once the
Herald Stampede
would outsell
USA Today
.

In the middle of Commercial Street, a truck with a tall stepladder on the flatbed was parked under one of the artificial Christmas wreaths strung across the street. A short guy in galoshes wearing one of those Russian hats with ear flaps that stuck out from his head like shelves stood two steps from the top, unscrewing one of the dead bulbs. Three people steadied the ladder. As I walked on up the street, I noticed that most of the wreaths had come undone during the windstorm we'd had a few nights ago. The storm before the storm.

I thought of Mom and wondered how she'd have taken the news of the charges against John Carlisle. She'd always looked up to him as a cultivated man. When she couldn't think of the name of an artist or a painting, I'd heard her say, “John will know.” And in that appreciation they'd formed a bond of outcasts. He was too high up the ladder and she was too far left of it to be accepted. Mom wasn't vindictive like me. When I'd asked her if she didn't just hate the people of Stampede sometimes for the way they gossiped, she said, “In the right circumstance, every one of us is capable of doing just about anything. How can you hate what's only human?” I wasn't a total stranger to darkness. I'd read
Lord of the Flies
. I'd watched the heirs of the widow in
Zorba the Greek
pick her house clean before the corpse had cooled. If I'd been the starving Raskalnikov, I could have bludgeoned the old pawnbroker. That kind of survival instinct resonated with me. Put me in a dark alley with Condon Bagmore and I'd cut off his scrotum next time he tried to come on to me. Give me a shallow pond with John Carlisle and I'd hold his head under until the bubbles stopped rising for what he'd done with Mom. And when I found out who he'd diddled with, I'd push him under and drown him again.

There was only one flaw in my logic. If John Carlisle was a freak, then maybe so was I. The only difference was he'd acted on his impulses and been caught.

11

The night of the Christmas open house it was raining, so Willard and I waited under a giant blue spruce across the street from the Carlisle house to stay dry. The roots at the base spread out above the ground like church kneelers and a white phosphorescent fungus that grew against the north side of the tree smelled like cottage cheese when I split it open under my nose. Occasionally, a gust of wind shook down a shower of giant drops through the boughs.

Willard sometimes went out without an umbrella, but he never went anywhere without one of his dogs and tonight it was Paddy, the Irish terrier with the flat skull and elongated muzzle. In seniority, Paddy had been second to Freeway. Willard brought him, he said, “Because we need a daredevil in case things get crazy.” The terrier was known for its courage and carried messages across enemy lines in times of war and that's what it felt like as we hugged the trunk of the spruce and took the names of those who crossed the Carlisle threshold.

“This'll tell us whether anyone believes he's innocent until proven guilty,” I told Willard.

Since Freeway's death, Willard had become quieter and harder to decipher. He'd taken to spending more time hunkered down in his room, petting the dogs. I recognized the syndrome and felt it was my job to come up with excuses for getting him out of the house. When I first told Willard what John Carlisle had been charged with, he'd gone stone cold on me and just sat on the edge of his bed, puzzling the idea. I wasn't comfortable explaining sodomy to him.

“Willard, he molested an underage kid.” I wanted him to take the same perverse joy in the news I had. The emperor wore no clothes.

He just nodded and rubbed the stubble on his face, making a sound like the bristles of a whisk broom. “What's gonna happen?” he finally asked.

“They'll probably convict him.”

He got real dreamy and massaged a couple of dog kibbles in the palm of his hand. “I went to jail once. They thought I stole Humphrey's jackknife. I didn't, but I know who did.” I had no idea who Humphrey was, but I knew it had to be someone he worked with in the asparagus fields. The kibbles turned to sawdust and dribbled out the bottom of his hand.

Payton Miller pulled up in front of the Carlisle house in the same black four-wheeler that we'd used to put Freeway down. He got out and pushed up the canopy of his umbrella, which had broken loose from the prongs on one side, and he centered it over his head as he walked around to the other side of the vehicle and opened the door for his wife. She was short and had to slide down off her seat until her feet hit the ground. Then she took her husband's arm and marched up the steps with him to the Carlisle's Queen Anne mansion, which had every turret and cubbyhole lit for the event.

“Why did Dr. Miller have to come?” I said.

“It's his job.”

And Willard was right. Dr. Miller attended to the afflicted. If John Carlisle were well, he would have stayed home. Still, I thought, it was a pretty pathetic turnout. If Dad wanted to get an early poll on where his readership was, all he had to do was stand under the spruce tree and count them. They were staying away in droves. John Carlisle was a one-man plague and nobody wanted to touch him. Of course, if I told Dad about the low turnout, he'd probably blame it on the weather.

Willard tapped me on the front of my sweatshirt with the back of his hand. “Hey, why don't you go in?”

“Have you gone loco?” I hadn't been in the house since Mom died. “You go.”

Willard stroked Paddy's head, pulling the forehead skin back so hard that it made little whitecaps at the tops of his eyes. “Take
him
.”

The idea of going inside the house made me itchy, but I had to admit I was curious. I'd never stood next to an accused felon and I wondered what kind of transformation the charge had accomplished in him. I'd be able to tell by looking him in the eye whether he'd done it. I'd put the question to him directly and see if he blinked. Still, my mere presence could be interpreted as a sign of support. He'd assume I was there because of Dad. “Let's just watch it from here, Willard, and say we went in.”