“You’ve got some bad ones, too.”
“Sure, but at least they’re smart and motivated bad ones. I hate to say this, but I have real contempt”—he caught himself—“I have a strong feeling of disappointment about most of our American kids. They don’t know why they’re here.” Knightly heaved a big sigh, stretched, then turned his back on the receding train, putting that particular batch of students out of his life. “Okay, Clyde. Let’s go get a beer.”
“Can’t do that. Got to go to work.”
“How about tonight, after you get off work?”
“Ken, I don’t get off until midnight.”
“That’s okay.”
“Then I have to go collect Maggie and get in bed.”
Knightly appeared not to hear any of this. “Come to my place, Clyde. Go ahead and bring that darn baby. My wife will look after her. We’ve got some talking to do.”
There was black ice on the roads that day, the shortest day of the year, and as soon as dusk fell, the cars started going into the ditches, and Clyde and the other deputies on duty began to litter the highways of rural Forks County with road flares and to jam the airwaves with requests for tow trucks. This was all good for Clyde, because he needed something to make the time go by faster. He had finally got it through his skull that Knightly had something important to say to him, and the end of his shift could not come soon enough. He watched the tow-truck drivers carefully, wondering just how a fellow went about getting a job like that, and what the pay was like. Certainly you could make a lot of money at it on a day like today.
Then he remembered his larger mission and reminded himself that he had other concerns for the time being.
He went back to the department and dropped his unit off for the second-to-last time; his next and last shift as a sheriff’s deputy would begin fifty-six hours from now, Christmas Day, from eight in the morning to four in the afternoon. He fired up the Murder Car and went out to Dick Dhont’s to pick up Maggie. By now he had perfected the trick of easing her from crib into car seat, and of spiriting her out into the station wagon, without waking her up. Dick Dhont handed off the baby-supply bag, and Clyde judged that it had sufficient provisions to keep Maggie alive for another few hours. He tossed it onto the passenger seat, on top of the blanket that concealed the two long guns, said good night to Dick, and then drove straight to Knightly’s house.
Ken Knightly did not seem to care for the company of professors or for the architecture of the yuppie/academic suburbs that had grown up to the north and west of Wapsipinicon. Rather, he lived in apart of Nishnabotna that many locals referred to simply as “Nigger Town” in recognition of the fact that something like twenty percent of the residents were black. Knightly had bought the mansion constructed by Reinhold Richter, the town’s first and last lumber king (he had cut down all the trees), back in the 1870s. He went in and ripped out all the stuff he didn’t like and all the wires and pipes that didn’t work anymore, then got it declared a historic-preservation site for the tax advantages, then put in state-of-the-art infrastructure. All told, there were nineteen rooms in the Richter mansion, and Knightly and his wife were going to fill all of them with the assembled evidence of their twenty years of livinga broad.
The yard was still torn up from construction, a sea of churned black mud frozen into a hard and brittle moonscape. Clearly it didn’t matter where Clyde parked, so he parked close to the door and carried Maggie gingerly up the steps onto the veranda, which was wide enough to race horses four abreast. Clyde looked for the doorbell and couldn’t find it. But a hand-lettered sign had been tacked up where you might expect to find a doorbell, reading “Pull the Rope.” An arrow directed his attention upward to a brass handle projecting from the door frame. It required a hefty yank. Some eighteen inches of frayed nineteenth-century rope eventually came out. As soon as he let it go, an internal mechanism began to reel it slowly back in, and a box of chimes rang out “Sleepers Awake.” Maggie startled and began to shriek. The door opened, five feet wide and three inches thick, and there was Knightly.
“Got to muffle those goddamned chimes, Sonia,” Knightly barked. His wife shouted something equally strong back, Clyde thought, but not in English.