Sean looked across at the heel mark in the soil, and he noticed some scratches to the left of it, the victim digging her fingers in as she'd scrambled up and over the embankment. "Feel like taking a guess what the fuck happened here last night, Sarge?"
"Ain't even going to try," Whitey said.
* * *
STANDING ATOP the church steps, Jimmy could just make out the Penitentiary Channel. It was a stripe of dull purple on the far side of the expressway overpass, the park that abutted it serving as the only evidence of green on this side of the channel. Jimmy spied the white sliver top of the drive-in movie screen in the center of the park peeking just above the overpass. It still stood, long after the state had grabbed the land for short money at the Chapter Eleven auction and turned it over to the Parks and Recreation Service. Parks and Recreation spent the next decade beautifying the place, ripping up the poles that supported the car speakers, leveling and greening the land, cutting bike paths and jogging paths along the water, erecting a fenced-in garden co-op, even building a boathouse and ramp for canoers who couldn't get very far before they were turned back at either end by the harbor locks. The screen stayed, though, ended up sprouting from the edge of a cul-de-sac they'd created by planting a stand of already-formed trees shipped in from Northern California. Summers, a local theater group performed Shakespeare in front of the screen, painting medieval backdrops on it and skipping back and forth across the stage with tinfoil swords, saying "Hark" and "Forsooth" and shit like that all the time. Jimmy had gone there with Annabeth and the girls two summers back, and Annabeth, Nadine, and Sara had all nodded off before the end of the first act. But Katie had stayed awake, leaning forward on the blanket, elbow on her knee, chin on the heel of her hand, so Jimmy had too.
They did The Taming of the Shrew that night, and Jimmy couldn't follow most of it? something about a guy slapping his fiancée into line until she became an acceptable servant wife, Jimmy failing to see the art in that but figuring he was losing a lot in the translation. Katie, though, was all over it. She laughed a bunch of times, went dead silent and rapt a few more, told Jimmy afterward it was "magic."
Jimmy didn't know what the hell she meant, and Katie couldn't explain it. She just said she'd felt it "transport" her, and for the next six months she kept talking about moving to Italy after graduation.
Jimmy, looking out at the edge of the East Bucky Flats from the church steps, thought: Italy. You bet.
"Daddy, Daddy!" Nadine broke away from a group of friends and ran toward Jimmy as he reached the bottom step, slammed into Jimmy's legs full-force, still saying it: "Daddy, Daddy."
Jimmy picked her up, got a sharp whiff of starch from her dress, and kissed her cheek. "Baby, baby."
With the same motion her mother used to push hair out of her eyes, Nadine used the backs of two fingers to push her veil out of her face. "This dress itches."
"It's itching me," Jimmy said, "and I'm not even wearing it."
"You'd look funny in a dress, Daddy."
"Not if it fit just so."
Nadine rolled her eyes and then scraped the underside of his chin with the stiff crown of her veil. "Does that tickle?"
Jimmy looked over Nadine's head at Annabeth and Sara, felt all three of them blow through his chest, fill him up, and turn him to dust at the same time.
A spray of bullets could hit his back right now, this second, and it would be okay. It would be all right. He was happy. Happy as you could get.
Well, almost. He scanned the crowd for Katie, hoping maybe she'd pulled up at the last moment. He saw a state police cruiser instead as it slammed around the corner of Buckingham Avenue, went wide into the left lane of Roseclair, rear tire slapping the median strip, the bleat-beep and sharp squawk of its siren slicing the morning air. Jimmy watched the driver floor it, heard the big engine rev as the cruiser shot down Roseclair toward the Pen Channel. A black unmarked followed a few seconds later, its sirens mute but no mistaking it for anything else, the driver cutting the hard ninety-degree turn onto Roseclair at forty miles an hour, engine humming.
And as Jimmy lowered Nadine back to the ground, he could feel it in his blood, a sudden, mean certainty, a sense of things falling miserably into place. He watched the two cop cars zip under the overpass and turn hard right onto the entrance road of Pen Park, and he felt Katie in his blood now along with that humming engine and slapping tires, the floating capillaries and cells.
Katie, he almost said aloud. Sweet Jesus. Katie.
8
OLD MACDONALD
CELESTE WOKE UP Sunday morning thinking about pipes? the network of them that coursed through homes and restaurants, movie multiplexes and shopping malls, and dropped in great skeletal sections from the tops of forty-story office buildings, floor by giant floor, plunging toward an even grander network of sewers and aqueducts that ran beneath cities and towns, connecting people more viably than language, with the sole purpose of flushing the things we'd consumed and rejected from our bodies, our lives, our dishes and crisper trays.
Where did it all go?
She supposed she'd considered the question before, in a vague sense, the way you wondered how a plane really stayed aloft without flapping its wings, but now she really wanted to know. She sat up in the empty bed, anxious and curious, heard the sounds of Dave and Michael playing Wiffle ball in the backyard three stories below. Where? she wondered.
It had to go somewhere. All those flushes, all that hand soap and shampoo and detergent and toilet paper and barroom vomit, all the coffee stains, bloodstains, and sweat stains, dirt from the cuffs of your pants and grime from the inside of your collar, the cold vegetables you scraped off the plate into the garbage disposal, cigarettes and urine and hard bristles of hair from legs, cheeks, groins, and chins? it all met up with hundreds of thousands of similar or identical entities every night and poured, she assumed, through dank corridors fleeced by vermin and out into vast catacombs where it commingled in rushing water that rushed off to?where?
They didn't dump it in the oceans anymore. Did they? They couldn't. She seemed to remember something about septic processing and the compacting of raw sewage, but she couldn't be sure that wasn't something she'd seen in a movie, and movies were so often full of shit. So if not the ocean, where? And if the ocean, why? There had to be some better way, right? But then she had an image of all those pipes again, all that waste, and she was left to wonder.
She heard the hollow plastic snap of the Wiffle-ball bat as it made contact with the ball. She heard Dave yell, "Whoa!" and Michael whoop and a dog bark once, the sound as crisp as the bat against the ball.