No answer, but the gaze held.
“Can you tell me what happened?”
There was no smell of alcohol in the faint breath. The curve was a bad one, but not the first the car would have encountered heading north from Bremer County in this fog.
“What happened?”
Josh was looking at Mikesh, his eye bright and glinting. “I didn’t ask for this,” my brother whispered, a terror seeming to grip him. “I’ve been alone.” And then, “Who are you?” The bits of what he said were not connecting, but the question seemed real.
“Arnie. I’m Arnie Mikesh.”
“Mikesh,” my brother’s eye was fixed, his face collected. A long pause, and then a whisper. “Comfort my mother.”
Confusion swept over Mikesh. “Is she here?”
My brother, whose jaw and neck remained cool under Mikesh’s touch, shook his head. Mikesh could tell he was growing weaker, his breath labored and shallow as he sighed, “It’s done.”
Josh’s lips formed a word that began with a shooshing sound, then whispered, “Take my spirit.”
Josh’s brow furrowed and he opened his mouth a few times as if to speak, but nothing came out. His eye fluttered shut and his face relaxed. The rigid jaw went softer, and the breathing became labored, then fluttered. Mikesh tried to inch forward, to get at Josh for CPR, but the car had dug its nest tightly, with room for only one. By feel, Mikesh shifted his hand and moved his finger around in my brother’s mouth to check that the airway was clear. His hand sensed what was left of the breath: moist heat. But that was all he could do. The labored breaths grew shallow, each one further apart. Mikesh could have comfortably driven his Chevy through the wide spaces in those tiny wheezing breaths. For minute after minute they dragged on without mercy, then quit.
Mikesh gave the face a push, but the eye was closed. After that last breath, the only sound Mikesh could hear was coming from himself: his breathing, his heart, his blood rushing through the tightened vessels of his ears. He touched the neck for a pulse. Mikesh didn’t know why, but he rested his left hand on the edge of my brother’s jaw. He nudged off the switch on his light, letting everything—including the banging of his heart—go quiet, until, at last, he heard the siren. When it got close, Mikesh pulled back his hand, turned the light on, grabbed his coffee cup, and scrambled up to the road to flag them down. By then he realized he was shivering so much the flashlight jerked in his hand like the hind leg of a dog running crazy in its dreams.
chapter 2
After he was wrapped in a blanket and given hot tea, after he talked to the matter-of-fact deputies, after a tow truck arrived to lift the car, after the hydraulic spreader pried the crumpled windshield frame apart, and after two men eased the body out and retrieved the bloody billfold from the back pocket of the khaki slacks, Mikesh found out the victim was named Joshua King. Then, his shoulders draped in an ambulance blanket, Mikesh finished the careful drive home. He tried to sleep, but it was no good. He had a couple of lagers, staring at a blank window. Over the hoppy fumes of the emptied second glass he finally nodded off. Sitting in his chair, light coming through the morning fog, he woke from a bad dream (a face, blood, everything disappearing in a breath of fire) and found he had a headache. He cleaned himself and changed, took some aspirin, and drove to Decorah to give the full story to a deputy.
Ten years earlier, a dying great uncle left Arnold Mikesh 120 acres of pasture, work land, and woods; a farmstead; a modest chunk of operating capital; and a middle-aged Chevy farm truck. Mikesh took it all, leaving behind a failed marriage and ten years of joyless foot service in the pork futures trading industry. He found a night security job at the community college in Calmar, the hometown his parents had abandoned for the unbroken sunshine of Fort Myers, Florida. Moving to his uncle’s run-down little place near Waucoma, Mikesh used the inheritance to buy the beginnings of a small herd of Murray Grey cattle from which he could raise bloodstock. From where he lived, Waucoma was two miles west, St. Lucas four miles east, Calmar twelve miles northeast. Decorah was an additional ten miles further in that direction. Mikesh occasionally hooked a stock trailer to the Chevy and hauled his Murray Greys to buyers interested in a heifer, a bull, or a pair of finishing steers around Iowa and adjoining states. But Decorah—at eight thousand the biggest town in a five-county area and the seat of the county north of the one he now called home—had in recent years become the typical furthest limit of his day-in-day-out travel. At forty, Mikesh’s world had shrunk to a circle with boundaries rarely more than a fourteen-mile radius of the tiny town where he had attended high school.
Mikesh’s visit to the Decorah law enforcement center began badly. He was directed to an inner reception area near the sheriff’s office. The sheriff’s assistant was on the phone. Mikesh was sure she waved her hand at him, as if to gesture him through the door with Sheriff on it. As he got close he heard an agitated voice. He paused and looked back to the woman at the desk. She gave her head a firm nod as if he should go ahead. As he opened the door the voice said, “Listen, I don’t know anything about it! What he did, he did on his own!” A dark-bearded man, veins bulging on his neck, turned to Mikesh. The sheriff, on the other side of the desk, looked up, startled by Mikesh’s entrance. Mikesh stumbled out an introduction. The sheriff, rising from his chair, eyed him as if he was a housebreaker.
“Who sent you in here?”
Mikesh felt a hand on his shoulder. The woman who had been at the desk was behind him, pulling him back and shutting the door. “Why did you go barging in there?” she said when she had him back in the reception area. Her coffee-brown eyes bored through him. When Mikesh explained that she had gestured for him to walk in, she squinted with mistrust. She led him to a table in a separate room where Jimmy Seegmiller, the deputy on Saturday morning office duty, would take his statement. Mikesh handed her, folded, the blanket sent home with him by the ambulance crew. After that he saw her hover at a desk across the hall, shuffling papers and glancing up occasionally to make sure Mikesh didn’t attempt another breaking and entering. Mikesh’s Bohemian-American grandmother Clarene used to assure him, “The morning is wiser than the evening,” but Mikesh felt like the scant hours of sleep he’d gotten had done nothing to clear his brain of the confusion of last night’s fog.
Jimmy Seegmiller, who arrived at the table knowing nothing of Mikesh’s blundering into the sheriff’s office, sat forward in his seat, savoring the morning’s excitement.
“One hell of a foggy night!” Seegmiller was more interested in relaying office news than in getting Mikesh’s story. There had been a car/deer accident on the edge of town, where a second car plowed into the first. The police took their cruisers off the streets for fear of another rear-end collision. “I don’t need to tell you how long it took the boys to get out to you in that stuff,” Seegmiller went on. “I hear you were in bad shape by the time they got there, Arnie.”
It gave a deputy like Seegmiller a buzz to remind a security man like Mikesh that he had been in something over his head, preferably way over.
“No, Jimmy. You don’t need to tell me how long those folks took to get to me last night. I had on my watch. It was cold. And for half the time I was keeping company with a dead man.”
“Okay, don’t get yourself worked up.” Seegmiller sucked in his belly and straightened in his chair: “we got to go through this.” Seegmiller was in his thirties but had never lost his baby fat: never had, Mikesh guessed, a decent haircut. Before getting his girlfriend pregnant and marrying her, and before signing on with the county, Seegmiller had at least one underage possession charge from the bust at a high school beer party, and a DUI
