The Triggerman Dance

Holt sat in the darkness and listened to the blood moving through his body. He tried to feel the bad cells replicating but he could not. His eyes were strong again—they were always strong when he was doing justice—and even in the dark it was easy to become familiar with the room. He could smell Mrs. Vu-Minh's perfume mixed with the fresh odor of soap that moved in from the bath. He thought about those early years with Carolyn, when he'd graduated from law school and entered the Bureau. Just them in the little apartment in McLean, the Bureau training programs, the long Sunday dinners at the Fish Market with some of the other trainees. His favor in the eyes of Walker Frazee, who brought him along and sent him west as soon as he could because Frazee was a Mormon and a family man too and he knew how badly Holt wanted to be back in the land that had bred him. Holt chose not to think of his excommunication when he renounced the church those many years later, when Patrick's death had turned loose all that was furious and secular and ungodly inside him, when he had been unable to sense the presence of God anywhere upon the earth, in any form. Holt did not think of that. Instead, he thought of Patrick's birth and the overwhelming, unforeseeable pride he felt when he first took Pat's little body into his arms. He thought of the way that Carolyn looked when she was feeding their infant son, her hair up and her robe open around her breast and the aura of wisdom that had surrounded her ever since she had become a mother. It was as if she had connected with something inside her that he—and even Carolyn herself—had never known was there. He thought of Pat's first steps, the funny little outfits Carolyn always got for him, the evolution of the boy's smile from gummy toothlessness to the manly assurance of Patrick, age twenty-two, graduating from college. He thought of Valerie's premature birth, the natural debut of her headstrong personality. He pictured her with the little ribbon taped to her head at Patrick's insistence because she was born bald and Pat thought a girl needed a ribbon, hair or not. He remembered the time at the breakfast table one Saturday when Valerie announced that Pat had dreamed the night before about driving a car and she knew this because she had been in the back seat. He could see her shooting her first round of trap at age six—she knocked down four—and how proud he was that she stood like him on the trap range, brought her gun up like he did, called for the bird like he did, held her gun at rest like he did, set her empties back into the ammo pouch like he did. He remembered her coming down the stairs for her junior prom and ho she seemed to contain enough life and beauty to animate a dozen young girls all at once. He thought of all these things and marveled that the world had stripped so much away but left him standing. He could feel the great fury that animated him in slumber, resting. He understood that he now had, in John, an avenue to Susan Baum. He could feel things beginning to end.

He looked at John in the darkness. The young man sat erect in the chair, his long coat parted to each side, his fedora placed squarely on his head, no angle, no comment implied. He was taller than Pat, and thinner, but John had the same strong profile and calm eyes of his son. He seemed so far away in his closeness not blood but something akin to blood. Spirit, he thought? A kindred spirit? He wondered if he was imagining things for John that were foolish to imagine, if he was ascribing an inflated value to hope. He wondered, briefly, if perhaps there was a God who looked over the affairs of men, and had arranged John in his path as a sort of salvation. No, he decided. No.

"Did Jillian come back and talk to you after she died?"

John was quiet for a long beat. He didn't move. "I thought I heard her voice in the wind once, but it was just the wind."

"How did you know it was just the wind?"

"I listened hard."

"I read a lot after Pat died. Voices from the grave. Spirit communication. All that. I tried my best to be open. Keep my senses ready for him. Never really happened. I figured maybe he was talking to Carolyn. I was always tone deaf."

"Those ideas aren't for everybody, Mr. Holt. I don't think it's a measure of your soul, how much you think you hear the dead."

"Ever dream about her?"

"Oh, yes."

"Me too. Sometimes I'd wake up laughing. Or crying. Or screaming. He seemed so real, then."

"Maybe that was his way of talking to you."

"Anything's possible. Though I never took much heart in that banality."

"Me neither. What I wanted most was just one minute to see her again, to say good-bye."

Holt listened to a car pass by on the street outside. "That was a nice thing you did for Carolyn tonight." He shuddered, though, when he thought of her taking the four majestically pathetic steps.

"I'm not sure what to do."

"Let her call you Pat. No harm I can see."

"Just as long as .. . well ... I don't disappoint her."