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  If anyone had to confront the issue at hand it was the coroner, Samuel Kelman, because Bay City seemed to produce a disproportionate number of accidental body piercings: boys fell onto implements, impaled themselves through playful jousting, and were samuraied through the gut with a frequency outside the bounds of normalcy. The coroner took care to avoid an inclination he had to find pleasure in the absurd deaths of those who lay on the slabs for examination. These stunts were generally pulled during the night. Attempts were made to defy physical law. Stupidity was like dust, or the earth itself. He drove home that evening—after the examination of the boy’s body, making note of the spike holes, the gash along the mouth, the stress fractures in the wrists; making note of the fact that the boy had died at approximately three in the morning. Driving home, listening to Schubert on the car stereo, he considered the bloodless silence of the boy’s open eyes (which he shut), fixed upward, and the paradigmatic (was that the word?) palm holes. The boy’s body—slightly glistening, with dimples of fat along the waist—seemed to hold a gentle repose, as if giving in to gravity. (Most of the time a body, during the first hours after death, lifted away from the surface of the table, as if barely tethered. A soul-empty body seemed as light as a seedpod, the brittle shell of a cicada.) Of course, he was seeing what he wanted to see in those eyes, pale and sad, somewhat elegiac, dark gray with a bit of blue around the senseless dilation of the pupils. On the way home—glancing over at the dreary waters of the Saginaw River—his thoughts ranged from puncture wounds to tetanus and then landed naturally upon the one time he had himself been impaled. This was in a town called Branford, near New Haven, Connecticut, goofing around with his buddies, walking barefoot along a breakwater of cemented boulders, enjoying the sense of being sure-footed against the wind gusts, which were coming hard off Long Island Sound that morning, when he felt something impinge upon his foot. A strange tingling sensation; nothing painful until he looked down and saw the point protruding near his toes. Then he became aware of a numb pain, remote and far off. He began running in panic, the board flopping like a wooden clog while his friends laughed and taunted him until it became clear to them what exactly was going on: He had gone into that realm few kids entered but all thought about. He had stepped on the proverbial nail. (In the car he tried to make sense of the physics of the accident, calculating the amount of force it would take to send a nail all the way through his foot, adding to the formula the fact that he had been stepping hard on the rocks at the time, doing a jaunty balancing act for his friends, until the nail sank in near the forefoot, up far enough to allow it to slide between the metatarsals.) What he could remember more than anything was the odd sense of reorientation the nail had given him, a Polaris of pain, until one kid yanked it out while another held his foot, and he, in turn, unleashed a high seagull scream that sent real gulls sweeping up off the beach and into the sky.

  None of the boys attended a church or had any formal religious education. All three devoted their spiritual energies to killing time, going up to the beach to smoke hash, or over to Detroit to smuggle beer across the bridge from Canada, loading it up by the case and transporting it past the lackadaisical border guards. Into the gap these facts formed, folks inserted wedges of philosophical thought and tried to avoid the possibility that the reenactment of a two-thousand-year-old event was pure senselessness on the part of teenagers who in no way meant to crack the universal fabric and urge a messianic event on the world. One commentator on a cable news channel argued that it was important to consider the possibility that these boys, in what was certainly a scattershot approach, were trying to find a way to grace. Good boys from good families had dragged the victim—there was a double-rut line of heel marks from the main road down into the gulch—to the spot under a clear, star-filled, late-fall sky, dug a hole with a fold-up entrenchment tool, and erected a cross, without really thinking. One professor at the University of Michigan made a connection between the trench shovel, the poetry of Wilfred Owen, and the Great War, and argued falsely that the soil in Michigan—glacial gravel in the gulch, with remnants of Lake Erie bed fossils—was close in consistency to the bottom of the trenches at Verdun. Another professor, hearing the story reported on the nightly news, brought forth Walter Benjamin’s theory of a messianic cessation of happening. He tried to draw (with shaky logic) a parallel between the mock event, the young ruffians (his words) putting their friend up on the cross, and Benjamin’s concept of a “revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past.” The deep impulse these kids had was to begin a conversation with the knowable universe and the unknown, hidden part that can be seen only when you rend space-time, he said, throwing his arms wide open before the class and then, composing himself, laying his hands flat on the desk, staying like that for a moment until—as was his habit—he reached up to adjust the dimple of his tie, pulling it tight at his throat. The students, who were used to these sudden outbursts, sat back in their chairs and glanced at one another. They were close in age to the kids in the gulch and found it hard to imagine that these fuckups, probably stoned out of their minds on crystal meth, had anything grand in mind.

  For her part, Emma Albee, an English teacher at Bay City High School, felt duty-bound to talk about the event in the gulch. (A team of trauma-control agents had been sent to help those students who were suffering changes in behavior due to the death of their friend—though in truth he had no friends, and was for the most part a loner who had, before his death, secured the wrath of most of his schoolmates.) She spoke carefully to the class, saying, yes, the action of the three boys was evil, in that they were free not to crucify their friend, just as you are free to do something or not to do something. Her students sat, for once, listening with rapt attention. You see, the tragedy of their action, she said, was in the fact that they made a gross error of judgment. We all think about doing things like this, don’t we? We all have these strange ideas, and sometimes we’re with our friends and we feel pressured to do them, but we do not because we are free, she said, looking for a segue into The Stranger by Albert Camus.

  Several news accounts made a great deal of the fact that the dead boy’s face had been excised from several school yearbooks, cut out neatly with razor blades, removed from the grid. Even Detective Collard had smirked at the kid’s image: flyaway hair pasted to a pimply brow; a mouth locked into a grimace, caught off guard by the tired school photographer. (One professor noted a striking resemblance between the victim’s face and that of Edgar Allan Poe. The same lean jawbone, the same uncomfortable arrangement between his neck and his lower torso, a general disagreement therein, so that even though he was wearing a striped polo shirt, he still had the bearing of a man in a clerical collar.)

  We just felt like doing it, was Bycroff’s statement during his confession. We was just trying it out, you know, like maybe he’d rise again and maybe not, but it was worth a shot, because he was such a lightweight in this life. Bycroff had been rejected by a series of foster homes that took him around the state of Michigan, itself the rough shape of a palm. From Kalamazoo to Petoskey, and then in a series of towns on the way back down to Flint, he proved himself deeply incompatible with several domestic situations until at last he found himself under the care of Howard Wood, a surly loner who, most thought, was abusive. We just figured we’d give it a try, the boy said, working his tongue around his teeth, staring up at Collard, who was listening carefully, tapping his notepad with the eraser end of his pencil. He listened and made notes but knew that this boy’s confession would be thrown out of court on some technicality. It was a fast-spoken confession. It came too easily to stick. The boy was speaking out of unrelated pains. It was the deeply innocent who often came up with the most honest and realistic confessions of crimes. When they had everything to lose, they often threw themselves into it beautifully, like a cliff diver—or was it a pearl diver? Those native boys who found it within themselves to go into the dark waters, their legs kicking up toward the light, flapping softly, their arms exte
nded as they clutched and grabbed. That was the nature of being a detective in these situations; you had to go as deep as you could with the air in your lungs burning and your arms fully extended in the hope that you might bring a pearl to the surface.

  He had faced this dead end before in other cases, the sense that one witness would blame the other and then the other, ad infinitum; the sense that the criminality would be smeared into something impossibly dull, that in the end, when the boys were sentenced and justice was meted out, he would still have questions about the case that would linger for the rest of his life. There was no end to it. He left Bycroff back in the interrogation room, behind the one-way glass, sitting at a wooden table with his chin in his hands. He left him there and went outside to get some sunlight on his face. He stood in the doorway and thought about it. He’d be a retired cop living up north, enjoying the solitude and silence. He’d be fishing on the middle branch of the Au Sable one day, casting a muddler into the stream, enjoying the day, and then he’d think of the gulch case, and it would all come back to him, and he’d remember storming out of the interrogation room into this bright, clear, beautiful light of a fall day in Bay City. He’d cast again into a riffle, thinking about the fish while, at the same time, trying to tweeze apart the facts of the case, remembering the voids, the gaping space between the statements and his failure to get the story straight. He’d spend the rest of the day in the river, or resting on the shore, until his creel was damp and heavy with trout. He’d lift the lid and look in and see the ferns placed around their flanks and their beautiful stripes. Then he’d stand there along the river and feel something else. He was sure of that. By the time he was retired he’d be full of lore, full of the wisdom of a small-town detective who had seen all he could see, acted as witness to the weird manifestations of the human spirit, and he’d have a suspicion that the best way to cope with the darkness of the world was to concentrate on tying flies, on clamping the hook and spinning the feathers taut with silk thread. The incident at the gulch would be the case that stood out from the others; it would be the classic, the one he pulled out of his hat when the conversations were boring, playing gin rummy or bridge; he’d pull the gulch out and present it as an example of how truly dark the times had become; he’d pull it out as an example of the limits of detective work. Every cop had one such case, the true zinger, the one around which the others rotated, and he would remember it clearly, not so much the facts around it, the words, the talk, the boys’ attitudes and posturing, their attempts to work around the guilt, but mainly the place itself, silent and gritty, with condoms curled like snakeskins in the weeds, and the ash craters, and the used needles, glinting in the moonlight, and how he went up there by himself over the course of the years, late in the night just before dawn, to shoot his sidearm into the air, taking aim at the cup of the Big Dipper, just plugging away at it like that, not because he was feeling helpless, or that the gulch itself inspired him to fire his gun, but because it was a pleasurable thing to do. He thought about this, standing outside the station house, taking in the sun. Nothing had changed in Bay City since the incident in the gulch. The media came, set up their dishes, sent the story to the world, got it moving around from head to head, and then just as quickly packed up and left it to be forgotten. On the stream at least he’d have the mercy of forgetfulness and the distance of retrospect and time; everything would be faded and somewhat obscure, except for the facts that he remembered, and he’d go back to his casting, he thought outside the police station, and he’d find mercy in the failings of his memory, and he’d let the case go, feeling his line curling around itself behind him as it swung forward, tapering out the toss of his rod, aligning itself along the point of the tip before unleashing smoothly onto the water until the leader, invisible to the fish, guided the fly to a landing at the intended spot. But for now he had to go back in and face the kid named Bycroff and try to get the facts and see who came up with the idea first, who dreamed it up and made it true.

  The Actor’s House

  Passing the actor’s house one thought of biker films, of his former edginess, of his beautiful young face on the screen, of his slight lisp—eventually a trademark of sorts—and the way he stood, slightly to one side, and tilted his head, along with the expressiveness of his features, which weren’t perfect because there was something wrong in the symmetry of his face, and his nose had been broken and he tended to blink in a way that made you aware of the lens—but that didn’t detract from the power of his genius, and he had three Academy Awards to his name. If you knew he lived there (when he did), you saw the house in light of his ownership. Otherwise, it was nothing more than one more grand house along the river in a long line of grand houses, and there was nothing to make it stand apart from all the others except for the wall along the front, which wasn’t built by the actor but rather by the next owner, an actress and television talk show host who found the house lacking in security and, two weeks after she moved in, began to modify it—so that, passing it at that time, one thought not only about the actor, but also about the actress, too, because from her modifications one garnered a sense of what she was like: slightly paranoid and a bit antisocial (there was a rumor afloat that some welcome-wagon soul had come to her front door with a pecan pie and had been duly told, in no uncertain terms, to fuck off). So for a few years one passed the house thinking about both souls (the actress and the actor) with a sense that, behind the walls, the actress moved about from room to room fluffing her hair with the flat of her palm, because she had a habit, most knew, of reaching up to touch her hair as if to affirm its existence—beautiful auburn hair that seemed to have as much to do with her fame as anything. But even a few years after the actor was gone, most people thought of him first and then the actress second when they passed the house, hidden behind the wall: high, built of expensive brick, with security devices in the corners on top—small red pinprick beams that couldn’t be seen in normal circumstances but could be seen when it was foggy out, or at night from certain angles, coming back from the city. There were security cameras in the trees, too, and tall evergreen bushes planted just inside the wall that grew to shield the upper reaches of the house from view, so that eventually you couldn’t see any of the house at all and had to look at the wall and the bushes and imagine the house as it had once been, years ago, before the talk show host/actress and even the actor lived there and the house had been owned by the Grande Dame of the theater who had been, at least in appearance, unconcerned about privacy.

  When the actor bought the house there had been a transition period in which those passing it still thought of the Grande Dame first and then the actor second (if at all), and then thought about her roles on Broadway, and in several movies, and the elegance and almost Gatsbyesque essence of her personality—the splendid parties she threw over the years on soft summer nights, with sedans and chauffeurs, bored, smoking, leaning against fenders, along the curbside. But then, eventually, over time, thoughts of the Grande Dame faded and the thought of the actor came first, as the primary owner, and with his ownership a different kind of feeling, when you passed, and a sense of mystery, because he was an enigmatic actor and known just as much for his reclusive nature and strange behavior as he was for the fact that he had grown enormously fat, so that the body that had once adorned the screen, and before that the stage, was hidden beneath rings of fat, like a Russian matryoshka doll; along with the fact that he was known for his ranting and his bitter anger and the high energy that seemed to reside beneath his roles in later years when, for example, in one film, he sat amid the jungle in a Buddha calm and mumbled his lines. Passing in a car, one imagined him shuffling from room to room in bedroom slippers, muttering to himself, rehearsing new roles or—in some visions—mumbling old lines that had once given life to new characters set in stone, so to speak, on the films that had recorded his gestures. Passing the actor’s house one often thought of a single scene, a favorite, and remembered it while, at the same time, imagining him fat behind th
e walls of the house. Because many knew the house’s interior—during those early days of the actor’s ownership—from the tours that had been given back in the Grande Dame’s days, when, once a year, she had opened her door to the general public and allowed them to traipse through, fingering the brocade bedspreads and touching her fine collection of Native American—they’d think Indian—artifacts, a huge array of drums and cradle boards. (Go ahead and touch, she liked to say. Touch anything you want.) Most folks taking the tour did not realize that she had a smaller house downriver, closer to the city, up on the Palisades: a more manageable house in which she spent most of her free time, and that the actor’s house, the one that for many years had been attached to her name by the general public, was mainly for show, or to make her feel a certain way. At the big house—nicknamed Wooden Nickel—she felt like the Grande Dame. At the other house—nicknamed Little Penny—she let her hair down and lay casually about and threw small, intimate dinner parties for her friends who came up from the city and admired her humility and the fact that someone so famous could live in such—and these were the words they used—limited circumstances, all the while knowing, of course, that she owned Wooden Nickel, too, along with Little Penny, and that she represented herself to the world—the general public—with Wooden Nickel and felt secure in doing so because she was not only the Grande Dame of Broadway but also a kind soul, altruistic and giving, and had shared the power of her wealth and fame more than most stars. Passing Wooden Nickel, those few who were aware that she owned Little Penny, and that she threw small parties there, were able to imagine both houses and to see the big house, with its widow’s walk and stately facade and fantastic backyard—the pool, the guesthouse, the boathouse with the green light—those few were able to see Wooden Nickel in relation to the actress who also owned Little Penny. But even those souls, limited in number, still looked at the house and—if they were in a hurry—thought of her simply and cleanly. Whereas later, after the actor bought the house, if the same souls passed they made a single connection and thought only of him—the actor’s house—because as far as anyone knew, it was his only residence. Not only was it his only house, but he lived there alone, too. So it took on the added weight of his isolation. He had moved there, most knew, after the divorce of his third wife, a famous beauty who had starred in a movie with him years earlier, a comedy about mismatched love: a young girl and a much older man who suffered from a form of autism that gave him (in the movie) an innate ability to communicate through his virtuosic piano playing. (And watching that film they couldn’t help but remember his old roles and the way, years before, his thick hands, tight in black gloves, had gripped the handlebars of his motorcycle while his hips shifted in his leather pants and his broad shoulders rolled gently beneath his T-shirts.) So passing the actor’s house one might think, for no apparent reason, unable to pin down exactly why, about undershirts, and in doing so envision the old actor walking from room to room inside, head bowed, his big gut lurching, moving solemnly, stopping now and then to gaze out the window while he thought about some long-lost moment, a scene from one of his movies, maybe, in which he had embodied some character and given it life only to end up feeling, when the shot was finished, a sense of depletion and loss as he sank down into his chair bereft of whatever creative fuel and psychic juice it had taken to get himself into characters so far from himself—and not even real in the first place—that it seemed impossible, at times, to see across the chasm between the two states: as if he were now nothing but a husk of skin that had once contained those former characters. And it was easy to imagine, passing the house, that he felt empty and depleted all the time now, a remnant not only of his former self but also of his former characters. Eventually, almost everyone in the town who had known the Grande Dame and taken the annual open-house tour of Wooden Nickel forgot most of the details of the interior, with the exception, perhaps, of the cradle boards, and when passing the actor’s house they were unable to completely imagine what it was like inside and could only conjure empty rooms defined by walls and the view of the river out the windows: the river, constantly changing, going from placid, glossy smooth one morning—littered with trash and old tree limbs—and then ruffled with long flails of chop the next, always changing and never the same. So they found themselves limited, most of them, to imagining what the actor saw, if he actually looked from his back windows, when he sat alone and gazed out at the water, thinking about his past with a bitter sense of regret over the loss of his third wife, who was dead, or the fact that he had squandered his career under the guise of being a genius, or perhaps because he really was a genius and did not know how to come to terms with the powers that came to him naturally and without study and made him feel uncomfortable: whereas (some passing the actor’s house thought) if he had had to train hard and work at the acting, he might’ve felt a sense of proprietorship over his abilities (and, in turn, the house); whereas, some imagined, passing, he had been helplessly buoyant upon the raging sea of his talents so that, in turn, he could only garner a sense of control over his life by not acting, or by taking bit roles that were far beneath his talents, forcing his so-called genius into small, ill-fitting characters the same way he now squeezed into his ill-fitting clothes.