In the days afterward Jake grew sullen and kept mostly to our bedroom. Ariel’s death devastated me and I broke into tears at odd moments but anger was Jake’s response. He lay on his bed and brooded and if I tried to talk to him he was liable to snap at me. He cried too but they were hot tears and he wiped at them with his fists and flung them away. His anger spilled out at everyone and everything but it seemed especially directed at God. Prayers at night had been a routine all our lives yet after Ariel’s death Jake refused to pray. Nor would he bow his head for grace before meals. My father didn’t make a point of it. He had so much on his shoulders already I suppose that he simply decided to let Jake and God work out the trouble between them. But I tried to talk sense into my brother one night upstairs in our room. He told me just to l-l-l-leave him alone. I’d had enough of him at that point and I said, “The hell with you. Why are you so mad at me? I didn’t k-k-k-kill Ariel.” He looked up at me from the bed where he lay and said with what sounded like threat in his voice, “Somebody did.”
Which was a possibility I’d chosen to reject entirely. In my thinking, Ariel had simply had too much to drink at the party and had stumbled into the river and drowned. She was a terrible swimmer. Her death was horrible beyond belief but it was an accident and accidents happened all the time even to the best of people. Or so I told myself. Looking back now, it’s easy to see what I was really afraid of. Which was that if Ariel’s death wasn’t accidental, then I had let the man most probably responsible for it get away and, oh Christ, I didn’t think I could live with that.
So even after Jake threw the possibility at me I continued to blind myself to it. Until Gus and Doyle opened my eyes.
Gus was a constant but quiet presence through much of the aftermath of Ariel’s death. When he entered the house he never ventured into the living room which had become like a cave where my mother brooded. He kept his presence to the kitchen where he talked with my father and ate the food which Liz dished from the contributions that poured in from friends and neighbors and members of my father’s congregations. I had the sense that he served as messenger and confidant and runner of errands in order to lessen my father’s burden.
Late Saturday afternoon, Gus caught me alone in the front yard with a stick in my hand making life miserable for a colony of ants. He stood beside me and watched the rage I’d incited among the insects as a result of breaking open the little anthill they’d carefully constructed. “How’re you doing, Frank?” he asked.
I watched the ants going berserk for a while before I answered, “Okay, I guess.”
“Haven’t seen you out much.”
“Too hot,” I said. Though the truth was that I didn’t feel like seeing anybody or being seen. I missed Ariel so much, felt so empty and hurting that I was afraid I might break down and cry at any moment and I didn’t want anyone seeing me if that happened.
“Bet a tall root beer in a frosted mug would cool you off. What do you say we head up to Halderson’s Drugstore on my motorcycle?”
A ride on Gus’s Indian Chief was always a treat and I was tired of the house and the darkness inside and Jake’s sullenness and the unsettling strangeness of everything that had been so preciously familiar and I said, “Sure.”
“Think Jake might want to go?”
I shook my head. “He just wants to be upstairs and be mad.”
“All right if I ask him?”
I gave a shrug and went back to poking at the ant colony.
Gus returned a few minutes later without Jake. I was sure my brother had told him to get l-l-l-lost but Gus reported that Jake had just said he’d rather be alone right now. Gus lightly punched my arm and said, “Come on, Frankie. Let’s ride.”
We didn’t go straight to Halderson’s. Gus took us out of town and over back roads. We flew between fields of corn that stood as high as my waist and that stretched away to the horizon on all sides with hot silver sunlight pouring over their leaves so that they glistened like the endless water of a green sea. And we dipped into the cool shade of hollows where creeks ran beneath leafy canopies of cottonwood and hackberry and birch. We climbed to the top of the ridge that marked the southern boundary of the river valley and below us spread a land full of the promise of a good fall harvest and cut by a river that I understood was the reason for the rich life there. And although I’d been angry at the river for Ariel’s death I understood the river was not to blame.
All the while I sat in the little sidecar and let the wind and the sun and the beauty of the land wash over me. I felt cleaner and better than I had since Ariel first went missing. I didn’t want to go back. I wanted to stay with that big motorcycle and leave New Bremen behind forever. But eventually Gus guided us into town and pulled the Indian Chief up before Halderson’s Drugstore and killed the engine and I hopped out of the sidecar and we went inside.
Cordelia Lundgren was behind the counter of the soda fountain. I knew her slightly. One of Ariel’s friends. She was heavy and suffered from a bad complexion and when she saw me her face took on a look of panic as if she had no idea what to say to me. So she said nothing at all.
“A couple of root beers,” Gus said as we sat down on the stools. “And make sure those mugs are good and frosty.”
Halderson came from behind the pharmacy window and leaned against the counter. “Those root beers are on the house,” he told Cordelia. He looked at me and said, “Frank, I’m sorry about your sister. It’s a crying shame.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said and waited for my root beer.
“Any more word, Gus?”
“No,” Gus said, and out of the corner of my eye I saw him gesture to Halderson in a way that was meant to cut off any further questioning.
“Well, I just wanted to say how sorry I am.”
I studied the miscellaneous items lined up along the preparation area of the soda fountain—cherry and lime syrups for phosphates, chocolate and butterscotch and strawberry for sundaes, chopped nuts and bananas and whipped cream—and without looking at Halderson I said, “Yes, sir. Thank you.”
“Anything you or your family need just let me know.”
“I will, sir.”
It was an awkward dance, with death calling the tune, and in a way I felt sorry for Halderson who was simply trying to be kind. I was relieved when Cordelia brought the root beers and Halderson returned to his pharmacy window.
Ten minutes later Doyle walked in. He was in uniform and he came straight to Gus and me.
“Saw your motorcycle out front,” he said.
“Yeah, Frankie and me, we just had ourselves a great ride in the country.”
“I’m really sorry about your sister, Frank. I promise you we’ll get the bastard who killed her.”