XXII – When They Got to West Virginia (and Jesse Used a Handgun, Not a Shotgun)
West Virginia, Mountain Mama, take me home. Country roads.
Right away something didn’t feel right to Jesse. He was used to disquiet. The last thirty-plus years had had that vague, anxious sort of glow. But right when they’d crossed the state line he’d started to feel actual dread. It was deeper than mere fear. His arms went cold and his heart had suddenly lifted up to his shoulder blades. Now that they were close he had an image in his mind that he couldn’t shake: old, dry blood on the wooden slats of an old crawlspace. He studied the treetops as he drove, overfull with bright green leaves and rising to his left up a range of high hills. He’d seen one house and one gas station during the last twelve miles of driving. This place was giving him the creeps.
Randy was asleep, his head on the passenger’s side window and the bag of water that had formerly been a bag of ice resting under his left hand on his left leg.
“Hey.”
Randy opened his eyes without moving his head, staring straight ahead as he gathered together enough facts to remember why he was sitting on the passenger’s side of his old pickup truck and why he was looking through a windshield at a tumultuous ocean of green.
“Hey. We almost there?”
“Yeah. The sheriff’s office is about 15 minutes away. Listen, I need to tell you something.”
Randy looked over at him with a blur still slowly clearing from his vision. He’d only been out for about thirty minutes, but exhaustion had dragged him into deep sleep quickly. He felt like it was the middle of the night even though it was still late afternoon.
“What’s up?” His voice sounded waterlogged. He blinked a few times and then sat upright, feeling the squishy Zip-Loc bag under his hand and looking down at it confused for a moment before setting it to his left.
“There was one other thing in that coffee can I found in my dad’s closet. I didn’t think much about it then or before we left since it didn’t really tell me anything. But then-”
Jesse felt his jaw tighten up, as though someone had just pulled the wire under his chin that was what really controlled his mouth. Another mile and still no houses or restaurants or a rest stop or anything.
“Now it seems different. After seeing what he wrote in that notebook, and hearing what Joe said he’d told him back then. I don’t know. Seems different.”
“What?” Randy asked rubbing his right leg to relieve some of the tension collecting there from sitting still in a truck and not being the one pushing the pedals. “What was it?”
“A picture.” Jesse looked over at him, feeling a sinking in his stomach as he said it out loud for the first time.
“Of a teenage girl.”
Melanie was nervous. Her face felt hot and there had been a thud in her chest for the last half an hour, even when she was standing up and moving.
Bobbie Jo was meeting her at Eden Park. She hadn’t sounded happy on the phone, but that was okay. What Melanie had told her in the letter had been hard to hear. She loved her friend, which meant she could handle her being unhappy with her. What she couldn’t handle was her diverting her life away from Jesus. There was too much at stake for Melanie to abide that. The nervousness was mostly that knowing, that certainty about how much was on the line. She’d prayed, upstairs in her bedroom, but now that she was ready to get in the car and go she felt somehow unready to stand on her own two feet and go do what should be done.
Bobbie Jo was pretty and popular and lively. She’d reminded more than one of her high school teachers of Meg Ryan. What could the remnants of a best friend say to her to make her reconsider what didn’t appear to have any cost right now? Once Bobbie Jo was on campus at UC in the fall she would be a darling of most of her peers for being an adventurous, supposedly sexually fluid young girl with high power blue eyes and all of the appeal of a cheerleader with none of the bitter aftertaste. Who would Melanie be at that point? Melanie knew who she was, and knew how little her opinion would matter to Bobbie Jo six months from now. Melanie who listened to Irish hymns on her MP3 player and read P.G. Wodehouse books while she ate lunch and had worn makeup exactly eleven times in the previous calendar year. This was her chance. Right now, before whatever influence she had was lost. She wanted to get Bobbie Jo to reconsider how much Jesus was worth.
She wiped away a tear from her left eye. She loved Him so much. He was everything to her. Melanie had no delusions about who she’d been or what she deserved. Well, she’d correct me there. She had as many delusions as the rest of us, still speckled with sin as she was. But in most of her waking moments Melanie was viscerally aware of what she had cost God, what her inborn sin and recklessness had taken to make right.
She was a scoundrel through and through, just like the rest of Adam’s children. She’d yelled at her mother, spilled bitter curses from her lips, loved television and food more than the God who made her. She had wounded her five younger siblings with thoughtless or selfish insults. She’d have made a wreck of her life and all she loved if Jesus hadn’t been who He was for her. Who only He could be for anybody. Forgiveness. A clean slate. Being right with God, her God, the God who was there.
Turn down the music and wipe away the second and third tears and make sure you can see as you put the car in reverse. Ask Him to save your amiga, to stop her from making shipwreck of the faith you’re so hopeful you truly saw that night you and she and Tracy Hall read the entire book of Hebrews under the lights of the school parking lot next to the softball fields. There were bugs buzzing and it was a quarter after ten by the time you all finished, but no one had seemed to care, and you were crying then, too, and you all seemed to be aware of how big a man and how big a God this Jesus was. And now put it in drive, deep breath, and leave it to Him.
She realized by the time she got to the end of the street that she’d forgotten her purse, but since she had the little wallet with her driver’s license she decided to just go ahead. It was an impulsive decision, the kind you make when your head and your heart are pulled a little tighter than normal.
“All right, listen,” Randy said, holding up his thick left hand like he was miming for an unruly child how he might theoretically backhand him.
“There are three ways to enter a police station: Like you did something, like something was done to you, or like you’re on a field trip. We’re going with option number three. Which means I need to do the talking. You look like you just got done shaking off a bad high in a bus station bathroom.”
“Right,” Jesse said, and nodded.
“We’re asking about whether your dad came in here over fifty years ago as a kid and asked some weird questions and hoping a report or something was filed.” Randy rubbed his chin and then put on his sunglasses. “This one’s bizarre.”
Jesse didn’t have it in him to laugh or try to reassure Randy, so he just turned off the truck and got out. The Sheriff’s Office, which sat just behind a large two-story brick courthouse, looked like barely more than a small house. There were four black SUVs out front with “Pleasants County Sheriff” on both sides, but if it weren’t for them Jesse might have thought the place was the office of a small town insurance agent. He frowned and squinted as he followed Randy up to the front door. This suddenly seemed like a bad idea.
As soon as they entered, the fortysomething officer sitting at the desk just inside the door in the small front room looked up at them without smiling. Jesse noticed that he didn’t even smile when Randy took off his sunglasses, hanging them on the collar of his shirt, and broke out his flashy Sicilian grin. He did speak, though.
“Good afternoon. What can I do for you gentlemen?” It was in the same tone the girls’ softball coach, a 6″2, 300-pound former marine, had given him and George Maynard when he’d caught them sneaking around outside the girls’ locker room his junior year of high school. Yeah, this was a bad idea.
“We’re hoping you might be able to find out something about my friend’s father who just died. He lived out here until he was a teenager, and he apparently came in here and talked to a dispatcher as a kid asking some questions and asking to talk to an officer, but he left before she could get one.”
He stopped for a second, hoping the officer would give any indication he had any interest in helping or in listening to any more or in not pepper spraying both of them and locking them up for interrupting his lunch. Randy got nothing, but Jesse felt a hinge break inside him and he stepped up to the desk and handed the officer the piece of paper with the dispatcher’s name and home phone number.
“He talked to her, officer. He was just a boy and he asked her if you could go to jail for ‘doing the special things.’ Then he ran out of here when she went to get him some water. It shook her up enough that she told her daughter about it. I talked to her daughter on the phone before we came out here from Cincinnati. I’m just trying to find out anything I can about my dad before his funeral. He ran away from home out here in Pleasants County as a teenager to live with an aunt in Jackson, Ohio, and I’ve never known anything about that life. About anything before he got out of the army and and met my mom. The night he died of an infection from a hip replacement at a hospital back in Cincinnati he said he wanted to tell me some things once he was out. But that never happened and I just want to figure out what he ran away from. I think what he came in here hoping to tell a deputy as a boy has something to do with it.”
The officer looked down a the paper, sucked in his cheeks thoughtfully, then called behind him.
“Hey, Greg?”
“Yeah!” Jesse and Randy heard from one of the rooms off the small hallway just behind the front desk.
“Come here for a second.”
The officer explained everything to Greg (and Jesse fleshed out a few more details, a bit more helpful and stable now that it actually seemed like it might be headed somewhere), and asked if the name of the dispatcher from fifty years ago rang any bells with him. After saying no, he did go into a room on the left side of the little hallway and verify that she had been the dispatcher from 1955 to 1967, but there was nothing in her file that would help Jesse at all.
“You don’t know anything else about your father, son?” Greg asked him, looking surprised but not judgmental.
“I wish I did,” Jesse answered, and thanked the officers for checking.
Before Greg turned around to head back to the office he’d come out of Jesse asked him if they might have any missing person photos of any kind from the 1960s.
“I’m sure if your father was reported missing he wouldn’t have been able to enroll in school up there in Ohio,” Officer Greg said, frowning.
“Yeah, I wasn’t thinking about him,” Jesse answered. He pulled the picture of the teenage girl out of his right pants pocket.
“I was wondering about her.”
Back outside, Randy kicked a pebble across the twenty-year old chipped asphalt of the Pleasants County Sheriff’s Office parking lot. His hands were in his jeans pockets and he looked frustrated, though he wasn’t. He just felt like there was something obvious missing from this picture, and he couldn’t quite decide what it was.
Jesse was looking at the front door of the office. The officers were both taking a look at what records they had on any missing persons from that far back. Jesse had suggested to Randy they step outside for a minute. In an office that small it just seemed somehow right to give the guys some space. Maybe if they were going to help at all they needed to be able to talk about crazy these two dolts from Ohio were.
And then as he let his eyes roll over the green front door, he knew at least one thing. And he turned around and looked at Randy with as much sadness as affection.
“Hey.”
Randy looked up. The late afternoon sun was hanging around his slick black hair. This little town and this strange new friend and that lessening summer sun, something stirred deep in Jesse. He longed for something he was sure didn’t exist. Maybe two things. And he was sad about it.
“I need to finish this alone.”
“What?” Randy said.
“There’s a car rental place down the street there. I need to finish this alone, Randy.”
Randy stared at him through his coal black sunglasses for seven seconds, knowing he was serious, and knowing somehow it was right, and yet still surprised enough to be speechless.
“I know you’re in it with me. But I want you to head home. You’ve done enough. I have to drive out there to that place alone. That’s something I have to own.”
He walked up to Randy smiling, pointed his right thumb towards the sky and his right index finger straight out and pointed it gently at Randy’s chest. He fired.
“That’s not a shotgun.”
“I know, man, it’s my hand.”
“No, I mean that’s not what a shotgun looks like.” Randy mimed holding a shotgun to show and pointed it at Jesse.
“Noted.”
They both turned to look back at the Sheriff’s Office door, and Randy exhaled loudly. Then he looked back over at Jesse, staring at him until he looked back.
“Get one more cup of coffee with me.”