34
Hold up, he says, and she stops and waits for him to come up beside her, no sound in the world but the soft whupping of his snowshoes.
He thumbs the pack from his shoulders and brings out two plastic bottles of water and they uncap them and drink, the water gurgling its way around clots of ice in the necks. She caps the bottle and unzips her jacket and fits the bottle into the pocket near her breast, and then rezips the jacket.
He watches her do this. And watches her after it’s done.
It’s too cold to drink, she explains.
He lifts his bottle again and then returns it to the pack, and she says: What else you got in there?
Granola bars. A couple of Snickers. Are you hungry?
I’ll take a Snickers, I guess. What else?
Nothing else. Nothing else to eat.
Tissue?
What?
Did you bring tissue?
Like Kleenex?
Like anything. She stares at him, into the yellow lenses, until he understands.
I have a small pack of Kleenex, that’s all.
Can I borrow it?
Of course. He digs into one jacket pocket and then another until he finds the small package.
She slips it into her jacket pocket with the Snickers, then she turns and begins to walk back the way they came, in her own tracks, downslope.
Where you going? he says after a moment.
She doesn’t look back. She points ahead to a squat, solitary spruce, wide and thick and hung with snow as if snow is its blossom and its only purpose. She missteps, totters on the snowshoes, rights herself.
Careful, he says, and she gives him the thumbs-up over her shoulder.
From the far side of the spruce she looks back through the snowy boughs, and the cold runs into her heart to see him standing dark against the snow just as she left him, far closer than she thought he would be. As if the distance she crossed to the spruce was an imaginary distance. Or as if he has moved as she moved but without sound and without tracks or effort.
She falters and then finds her voice: I can see you watching me.
I can’t see a thing, he says, and she knows it’s true.
She bends to tighten the bindings over her boots. I can see you watching, she says again. He doesn’t move. Standing there. I can’t go with you staring, she says, and at last, with an air of parental exasperation, he turns his back to her.
She takes a side step in the snow, downslope. She thinks she’s made no sound but can’t be sure because of the bloodbeat in her ears. She stands a moment in the stopped time and stopped breath and stopped heart of the starting blocks—Breathe, Courtland—and then she takes another step, and another, keeping the tree between herself and the Monkey, and when she is twenty paces from the spruce she turns and she begins to descend the mountain in great, soundless, weightless strides.
35
All that followed that long night and into the morning was a perverse waking dream that would not end but only taunted him with the taste of ending, with scraps of near sleep wrenched from him at the last second and replaced by more noise and more walking and another bare room or the same bare room with the same man or men across a steel table or different men but always the same questions and the same hard light and the only break in it all, the one brief escape, was a real dream that rose up during a lapse in procedure, some miscue among his keepers that left him alone long enough to sleep, and in his sleep he climbed a path in the woods in the dark, making his way by the progress of the animal he followed, a dog or wolf of such whiteness it raised shadows from the things it passed, the trees and stones. Then the woods cracked with thunder and he jolted awake to the iron bars and the concrete and to the backlit man telling him to get up, and he was led in handcuffs once more down the corridor into the bare room.
The man at the table did not look up but sat studying the pages of a file that lay open before him while the man who brought the boy removed his cuffs and wordlessly left, pulling the steel door shut behind him.
The man at the table wore no jacket, only a white long-sleeved shirt buttoned at the wrists and at the collar, his tie well-knotted and pristine. The leather straps of his gun holster had a defining effect on the shirt, suggesting the good health and fitness of the torso beneath it. He had a full head of short black hair razor-line-parted on one side, and his jaw was blued with stubble. He wore a gold wedding band.
This man at last looked at the boy. Searching his eyes as if he might see there what none of the men before him had thought even to look for. Whatever he saw he dropped his gaze and let it rest on the boy’s denim jacket, buttoned nearly to the throat. They had taken his white T-shirt with its catalog of bloodstains.
He looked again into the boy’s eyes and said: “Sean, my name is Detective Luske. I’m with the Omaha PD Sexual Assault Unit. Would you like some water?”
“All right.”
The detective filled a paper cup from a dispenser in the corner and set it in front of the boy and sat down again.
“Sean. As you know, since you say you saw it in progress, that girl you had with you in that truck last night was raped. By at least one assailant. Maybe as many as three. Now, she was inebriated and she was passed out for much of it, but I’ve talked to her and she believes she can identify those boys who were sitting with her inside the Paradise Lounge, if not necessarily those who raped her. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
“What I want to do, Sean, is I want to bring another officer in here and take a sample from you. Would you agree to letting me do that?”
“What kind of sample?”
“A DNA sample. From the inside of your cheek. Your mouth. It takes about two seconds. Would you agree to letting me do that?”
“I won’t try to stop it.”
“That’s not good enough. I can’t take the sample without your consent unless I get a warrant. But it will look better for you if you give your consent.”
“You mean verbally?”
“Yes.”
“All right, I give my consent.”
Luske sat back and the door opened and a tall thin woman stepped in. She wore a white medical smock and white latex examination gloves. A silver badge swung from her neck on a lanyard. She asked the boy to open his mouth and she scraped at the inside of his cheek with a plastic wand and he smelled her latex gloves and remembered the doctor at the hospital, the Chinese man with his needle light, and the woman placed the wand carefully inside a plastic tube and capped the tube and went away again.
“How long will it take?” said the boy.
“How long will what take?”
“The test.”
“That has no bearing on this investigation, Sean. The test is for the State, for its case, should it decide to bring one.”
The boy sat, hands on the table.
The detective picked up his pencil and began drumming the eraser on the table. The boy watched him.
“I don’t suppose I can smoke,” he said, and Luske shook his head and said, “There’s no smoking in this building,” and he reached into the pocket of his suit jacket draped over the chairback. He held the boy’s pack across the table and the boy pulled a cigarette free and the detective lit it with the boy’s lighter. He watched the boy draw in the smoke and blow it toward the ceiling.
“Sean,” said Luske. “Tell me why you went into that alley.”
“I had a feeling,” the boy said, once again.
“A sexual feeling?”