After some books got piled on the parcel I did not notice it at all.
Mostly, if I ever thought of Don, I just hoped he was happy. Maybe he was in Europe with Sasha. Maybe he was dead in Bangburn Balls, but still, maybe he was in Europe with Sasha. Sometimes I'd picture them in the leafy, medieval quarter of some city, strolling through a park, sitting with a coffee, a beer, tired from walking all morning, tired in that contented way when you are moving through a land of alien pain, a land that expects nothing but your money in return for the privilege of strolling and drinking coffee and beer and being forever unaccountable for this city's particular and ancient agony.
Maybe Don would finally know that fallen joy, the empty liberation, of drinking an espresso or a crisp white ale and then strolling along some worn battlement where young men once lay in heaps, hacked and gored by halberds and axes and pikes, smashed by siege stones, and the women and children and old men lay nearby in other shit-streaked heaps, raped, dead of fever, all this slaughter just a little historical entertainment between cafe stops, the horror far in the past, bound up in modes of thought and styles of hosiery humankind would never abide again.
But maybe he wouldn't know that joy and liberation at all. Maybe he would read the plaques about the sieges and think of Vasquez's head exploding off her neck. Or maybe he wouldn't be able to stroll much, his humps hot and itchy, the boat-shoed feet of his girls snagging in the cobbles of every rue or strasse or avenida. Perhaps I pictured this idyll just to avoid the truth, which was that Don was probably never going anywhere.
Then again, maybe I wasn't going anywhere, either.
Horace had been right about the parallel universe. I'd spent a long time living there. Purdy had been right about the bitterness. I had always been bitter, was still bitter, was bitter about the bitterness.
We were all of us just flushed with that feeling already fled.
But I had Bernie. I had my painting again, which could maybe deliver me some peace precisely because it would never deliver anything else. I even had a job lead. This local drug-and-alcohol rehab needed a part-time communications officer. Experience in fund-raising was a plus. Here was my chance to fail once more in an office environment. Worse came to worst, maybe I could get a discount on treatment. My hangover would hang up his gun.
No, I probably wasn't going anywhere.
I was digging in for the long night of here.
Sometimes I wondered if Don was doing the same, and a few months after I talked to him I sent him an email.
A week later Sasha replied from her own account, no message, just a link to the Pangburn Falls Sentinel website. I had to wade through some home-page reports about zoning disputes and a proposal for a new band shell before I scrolled down a sidebar of older articles. I guess she wanted me to wade, but after a while I saw the headline: POLICE CONTINUE SEARCH FOR SUSPECT IN LOCAL VETERAN'S DEATH.
I shuddered, almost clicked the window shut.
If I didn't read the story, if I turned my computer off right now, Don could still be okay. It was the thought of a child. It was the meaning of childhood.
According to the article, a young man had been murdered on an old logging road. An explosion heard for miles blew his truck into the trees. Pieces of the victim had scattered hundreds of feet down to the banks of a creek. Inspectors were disturbed to find evidence of an improvised explosive device, similar to those employed in recent conflicts overseas. The victim, Todd Wilkes, a native of Pangburn Falls and a decorated veteran of tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, was twenty-four. The police department's prime suspect, Don Charboneau, also of Pangburn Falls, had been missing from his last known residence since the day of the attack.
Authorities welcomed any information that could lead to his capture.
Sam Lipsyte
