Waking the Dead (45 page)

I never was in Potomac and I never gave him a holler. Instead, I called Richard Donahue, first at his office, where the phone rang a dozen times without anyone’s answering, and then at his home. It was early afternoon. A child answered the phone. A TV was blaring in the background. I asked to speak to Mr. Donahue and then Richie was on the phone. He didn’t seem at all surprised to hear from me. I told him I was in New Orleans, that my plane to Washington was leaving in a few minutes, that I’d be there in two and a half hours, and that I wanted to talk to him about the Minneapolis bombing. I heard him snap his fingers and an instant later the TV set was turned off. Then he said he would meet me at his office.

A
TAXI TOOK
me from National Airport to 9th and Pennsylvania. I’d had nothing to eat that day but a cup of Delta coffee and a bag of Planters Peanuts. The sky was low, soft, and dark; the traffic seemed imbued with mystery beneath the indigo clouds. One by one the headlights came on, as if each auto was in its turn enchanted.

The J. Edgar Hoover Building found itself surrounded by Washington’s tiny pornography district, a little Toonerville of trashy books and peep shows and movie theaters showing double features with titles like
Box Lunch
and
Spurts Illustrated
. The headquarters were designed under Hoover’s guidance and what was created was a contemporary fortress, a building that ended up looking like an enormous, gloomy Motor Vehicles Bureau run by civil servants who lived in dread the populace might come storming in to steal license plates. The Hoover Building was built without columns because Hoover thought Soviet agents might hide behind the columns. The windows closest to the ground were sufficiently high to be unattackable by thrown stones.

When my taxi pulled next to the curb I opened the door and it hit the cement. The FBI headquarters were so massively heavy that all the streets around it were sinking: the distance from curb to street had tripled in ten years.

I stood before the building. I heard the taxi pull away and after that there was a long deep roll of thunder. I seemed not to be able to move. The doors to the colorless building opened up and a big, fleshy, redheaded agent walked out, buttoning his raincoat, whistling to himself. He looked like a small-time college football player and he noticed me lurking in front of the headquarters. He gave me a quick, visual frisk and decided I was all right. He walked right by me, not so close as to make contact but close enough to let me know. Those guys all had a hunter’s knack for dominating prey. I listened to his footsteps disappear and then I was still there, still standing in front of headquarters, unable to get a step closer.

And it was then I realized I would not be going in. Agent Donahue was probably already at his desk, with his boy’s blue Crayola drawing behind him—Sean, yes, that was the boy’s name, Sean—and the inscription proclaiming that “My Daddy is the Smurfiest.”Why had he suggested we meet here and not at his house? Or in a coffee shop, a Roy Rogers? They were probably developing a case I knew nothing about, following leads, making connections, endlessly spinning out possibilities as complex as the circuitry of the brain. Until this moment, standing before that monolith with the thunder rolling around the soft obsidian sky like a madman in a padded cell, I had believed that I could walk into a place like this—a DA’s office, a precinct—and have nothing to hide, nothing to fear. But all that had suddenly changed.

I had not come here to tell them Sarah was alive but to ask them what tests had been run to identify the body they’d taken out of that white Volvo in Minneapolis. But what guarantee had I that it would stop there? Donahue had specified that we meet in his office; clearly this was not a social call. He would want to know why I was asking. If they had developed any intelligence about Sarah or about the people she was working with, something I might say might fit in, or serve as a lead.

I didn’t dare speak to them. Suddenly every person inside that building was my mortal enemy and it really did break my heart. It was just so unbearably sad to me.

And yet, even as I backed away and then turned on my heel, walking faster and faster, until my breath was coming in rapid, jagged gasps, I knew there was another reason I was fleeing. If Donahue could somehow show me real proof that it
had
been Sarah in that car, that meant I had burst through the membrane separating the rational from the irrational, and once you’re through it, you are running free. I didn’t want to know I had lost my mind. I didn’t want anyone to prove to me that she couldn’t possibly be alive.

I
DON’T REMEMBER
where I spent that night. It was in a hotel. The next morning, Sunday, I was on a flight to Minneapolis. The day was frigid and bright; the sky was a high blue tent pitched on poles of ice. I had only one more stop to make: I had learned that Steven Mileski was working for the state of Minnesota as a Catholic chaplain in a place called the Lake Omega Home for Older Boys, which was a sort of year-round camp for boys between eleven and eighteen. But the money had run out quickly and now Lake Omega was all that existed of the original impulse, and it was left with taking care of boys with problems ranging from retardation to petty larceny. A year before,
Newsweek
had run a story about Lake Omega calling it something like “Little Houses on the Prairie for Kids at the End of the Road.” Accompanying the story was a photo of a staff meeting and sitting near the head of the table, right next to the mustachioed, ski-sweatered director, was Mileski, his long dark beard looking as heavy as a beaver’s tail, his eyes so deeply black they showed on the other side of the page.

Lake Omega was a half-hour drive from the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, near a town of Delft blue silos and yellow clapboard farmhouses called Center. The cab driver got directions to the place people in Center called the School. The roads were straight, the turns were sharp, the icy stubble in the cornfields stretched out and slowly undulated on to infinity. On either side of the macadam, the snow was piled three feet high. The driver was not a talker; he was content to drive and listen to Andy Williams and Skitch Henderson on the radio and I was sitting in the backseat with my hands on my knees, looking out the window, with my mind feeling as impenetrable to the plow of reason as those fields that came flashing by, flashing by, and which were now giving way to dark clumps of forestland. Finally, we came to a sign announcing
THE LAKE OMEGA SCHOOL—AN EXPERIMENT IN SUCCESSFUL LIVING
. The sign was burned into wood, lovingly crafted, rustic. Next to it, however, was an orange and black
NO TRESPASSING
sign bought in the local hardware store. The narrow road turning in toward the school was plowed, but access to it was blocked by a chain-link fence hung between two giant maples. The gate was locked.

The cab driver stopped his car and turned around to face me. He had a long, soft face, droopy, rather mad-looking eyes, jug ears. “Do you have the key, sir?”

“I’ll walk from here,” I said. I reached for my bag and realized with a sudden lurch that I’d left it in the Minneapolis airport, or on the plane, or in the Washington airport, or in my hotel … It hardly mattered: my credit cards were in my jacket. I paid the driver and gave him a correct tip. “Can you wait here?” I asked him as I stepped out of the cab.

“I have to go back to the city,” he said.

“I won’t be very long. An hour at most.”

“I got to get back to the city,” he said. He opened his eyes wider for emphasis and they became perfectly egg-shaped.

“Look here,” I said. “I’m a U.S. congressman from Illinois. And this is important.”

He looked at me more closely, bringing me into focus with a few rapid blinks. I looked more like a fugitive from justice man a congressman. “Are you a Democrat or Republican?” he asked.

I only wanted to give the answer that would have the best result. “I’m a Republican,” I said.

He shook his head sadly. “I’m late as it is. I have to get back,” he said. And with that, he reached behind and closed the door. He made a U-turn. I stood there and watched as he drove away.

I climbed the fence and flipped over. The air was cold and dry; each inhale seemed to X-ray my respiratory system. It was a winter several notches more intense than the winter I’d left. I was wearing the comfortable brown walking shoes I’d had on since the campaign had begun and the earth seemed to pump waves of its own frigid reality straight through my soles. I dug my hands into my coat pocket, hunched my shoulders, pressed on. The road wound its way through the woods; the low boughs of the conifers were bent down to the ground from the weight of the snow they held.

It was a still, windless day; I could hear the busyness of the birds farther into the woods. I walked for perhaps a quarter mile and with each step I expected to be apprehended. But there was no sign of anyone. Finally, I came to Lake Omega itself, covered with ice and tracked-over snow. The sun was straight overhead and it seemed to tilt forward like a face over a crib. The sky was seamless and the trees around the lake were motionless, as if they had been sewn like the pattern oh a sweater—pine tree, pine tree, pine tree.

I followed the road around the lake and then off to the right. I came to the cabins where the boys and their overseers lived: cedar-shingled bunkhouses, each with a name over the door like Sunrise House or Rigor Hill, each with small curtainless windows, each with a potbellied stove hooked into a cinder-block chimney, each with eight narrow, militarily neat beds, each empty of people. I passed the basketball court. Someone had neglected to take down the nets and they hung there like thickly frozen lace, reflecting the sunlight.

In front of me was a large white building, with a sloping roof and a wraparound porch. It looked like a hunting lodge. There were cross-country skis and snowshoes resting against the walls and next to the wooden steps was a sign that said
LAKE OMEGA HALL—BE RIGHT ON OR GET RIGHT OUT
. And behind Lake Omega Hall was a smaller A-frame, painted brown, with double doors and one large, rather homemade-looking stained-glass window. Through the stillness of the winter air, I heard sounds coming from the A-frame and I walked toward it, and as I did I realized I was walking over the slight icy indentations of hundreds of footprints.

The double doors were opened and I walked into what was Lake Omega’s assembly hall as well as its chapel. Sixty or so boys sat in gunmetal-gray folding chairs, and as I saw the backs of their heads it seemed they all had identical Spartan haircuts. Near the door was a cast-iron wood stove, bending and curling the air above it with immense waves of heat. I quietly closed the doors behind me. Not one head turned. The attention of everyone was on the makeshift pulpit, where Father Mileski was standing, wearing black trousers, black shirt, collarless, with a down vest, bright green, completing the picture. In the last row there was an empty chair on the aisle. I quickly sat down in it, next to a broad-faced boy about seventeen, with light hair, blue eyes, acne. He glanced at me as I sat down. “Hi,”he said, with a quick smile. I said Hi back to him and he clicked his attention back toward Mileski while reaching over to shake my hand.

“And when we suffer,” Mileski was saying, with his hands folded before him, standing without gesture, letting his eyes and his voice do it all, “when we suffer. As we have. As we do. As we
shall
. Do we suffer alone? Does suffering come and—
single
us out? No. No. NO! We are never so close to him as we are when we suffer. But what does that mean? Does that tell us to—to get high, to get drunk and drive Daddy’s new car into a tree? Hey, Dad, like wow, I did it to be nearer to Jesus Christ our Savior. No. Of course not. We have to try and find our way. We have to try and live good lives. But we do it with the sacred knowledge that we
can’t
. With the sacred knowledge that we will fall, we will fail, we will make a total royal mess out of just about everything. He does not reward our success. He rewards our
effort
. Let us harness our energies. Let us
use
some of that fantastic power and invention we’ve been using to foul up our lives, all those—
calories
we’ve been burning to make ourselves miserable. Let’s take just half of it and use it for making ourselves happy. And peaceful.” He paused and looked around at the faces before him. He took a deep breath and unclasped his hands. “I love you. And God loves you. He gave you his only Son. He let us nail his Son onto a cross because it was the only way he had to tell us how much he loves us. He has given us this earth. He has given us our lives. Let’s not screw it up. Amen.”

At the end of the sermon, everyone stood. I stood as well; I hadn’t realized until coming into the warmth of the chapel how frozen I was. My face itched as it thawed. A boy standing to the left of Mileski began singing a hymn I had never heard before and everyone joined in. It was about wandering and finding your way home.There were lambs, there were shepherds, there were babbling brooks. It was awful. When the song finally ended, we all sat down. Mileski looked out at us. I slumped further down in my chair. He shook his head. “Guess what, guys? I don’t have anything more to say.” He clasped his hands together and placed them near his chin, bowing his head, closing his eyes. He stood like that for a few long moments until he said “Amen.” And we said Amen and then it was all over. Almost in perfect unison, the boys and the staff stood up and began filing out.

I stood next to the stove. Each person who went by me tried to make eye contact. Since slinging the law around in Chicago, I had somehow forgotten that boys in trouble could be this white. They were blond, Nordic, well-built kids; they looked like they ought to be attending hockey camp or playing in the school band. Finally a staff member walked by me and stopped dead in his tracks. He was a portly guy in his forties, with a Beatle haircut and rimless glasses.

“Who are you?” he asked, without the slightest attempt to put a friendly inflection on it.

“I’m a friend of Steven Mileski’s,” I said. “I came from Chicago to see him.”