“What are you doing?” asks Rigo.
“Confessing,” says Cooper. Then he addresses the crowd. “Calvin Cooper,” he announces, parroting Rigo’s tone. “Born John Lyon Barker in the great state of Vermont, forty-five years ago this week. Like everyone else here, I changed my name on the day I arrived, because just like all of you”—and here he gestures to the assemblage—“I needed a fresh start. A last stop and a fresh start—isn’t that how the welcome speech goes?” The street is silent, save for Cooper’s voice. Rigo closes the folder slowly. He seems unsure what to do next. Which is more or less the intended effect, Cooper thinks, as he watches Rigo waver. Santayana simply regards the proceedings from her lawn chair, silent, like a judge on the bench. She, too, is not sure where this is going, but it’s hard not to be transfixed. It’s like bearing witness to a self-immolation: a man in the street, doused with gasoline and now standing, trembling, the lit match pinched between his fingers.
“Let me tell you all what’s in that file,” Cooper continues. “Calvin Cooper, age forty-five, currently resides in Caesura, Texas, known locally as the Blinds. When I was sixteen, I fucked my best friend’s girlfriend and lied about it to his face repeatedly, until one afternoon he shot me in the shoulder with a crossbow as revenge.” Cooper taps his left shoulder. “I’ve still got the scar to prove it. My friend claimed it was an accident, but I know it was a warning, and, either way, it hurt like a motherfucker, and still does. Luckily, it wasn’t my pitching shoulder—I say luckily, because later that year I fathered a son, by a different girl, a teenager, we were both seventeen, and I abandoned her and the child both. And the reason I gave her for why I couldn’t stay was because I had to pursue my baseball career, which was bullshit. Even then I knew I wasn’t good enough, not really. But she didn’t know that, and she bought it, at least long enough for me to leave. She did a great job, though, without me. In fact, she did such a good job that she wrote a whole book about it. It’s called Raising Icarus. You should check it out. It became a big bestseller. It’s all about overcoming adversity to raise a wonderful kid. She’s become a kind of parenting guru. As for me, that’s the only way I know my son. From reading about him in a book. And that’s the only way I deserve to know him.”
Cooper is crying now; he doesn’t care, because his voice stays steady, and that’s what matters. As long as his voice stays steady, he doesn’t care about the rest.
“Where was I?” he says. “Oh yes, at age twenty-six, my baseball career long over, I started work as a prison guard, because why not? I figured maybe I would prosper surrounded by people worse than myself, and the only place I knew where such people were collected was in a prison. I was not well suited for the job, though, given I was weak and frightened and full of anger, and so, one year in, I got jumped and beaten badly by an inmate, who slammed my head in a door, repeatedly, which is how I got this scar right here.” Cooper gestures to his forehead and the jagged souvenir. “The inmate jumped me because he took drugs to make him strong, which also made him angry, and I had called him an unconscionable name because I was stupid and scared as shit, every single day. He jumped me, and beat me senseless, and probably would have killed me if not for the intercession of the other guards. And a month after that, I turned a blind eye when, in retaliation, my coworkers pummeled the living shit out of that man and beat him half to death.” He pauses here, remembering the broken face of the man. He remembers it so well. “Last I heard, that man can’t walk or talk or even get out of bed or feed himself. The settlement from the state covers his medical bills, and I was allowed to take an early retirement, without benefits or honor. I headed south and wound up here, and that man wound up drooling all over himself, kept alive by a machine. If anything in that story sounds to you like justice, you just let me know which part.”
The sun throbs, the heat comes in waves, like water lapping a shore, and Cooper sweats, and though his eyes stay locked on Rigo, he recounts all this in a voice loud enough for the entire street, even those in the chapel, to hear. He knows Fran can hear him. He wants her to hear. He wants everyone to hear. “Let’s see, what else might it say in your file, Rigo?” he says.
“You didn’t even get to the best part,” Rigo says, watching him, fascinated.
“That’s right,” Cooper says. “The best part.”
Inside the chapel, Dawes calls out weakly to Fran Adams, who’s standing, transfixed, at the window.
Fran turns. She didn’t catch what Dawes said. “What’s that?”
“Stop him,” says Dawes.
Fran steps in, closer, responding as much to the labored urgency in Dawes’s voice as to what she’s saying. “What?”
“He doesn’t know,” says Dawes.
“He doesn’t know what? He doesn’t know his own past?”
“No.” Dawes thinks back to the library, the search engine, the crime blotter, the cold, bright screen. “Not all of it,” she says.
Cooper continues, emboldened now. He has complete command of the street. “After all that, I moved to Austin, where I took a cushy job as a security coordinator for a software firm, a job that was gifted to me out of pity by an old baseball teammate from community college. I spent the better part of the next decade doing nothing but staring at monitors, drinking, and fucking people over, not least myself.”
“Sheriff Cooper, we’re not here to conduct a therapy session,” says Rigo, trying to wrest away control of the performance. “We’re here to discuss your crimes—”
“Of course. My crimes. Well, you know what’s coming, Rigo. You, better than anyone.” Cooper continues, to the crowd: “At age thirty-seven, I took this job because I knew in ten years I could retire. That was the deal. And I knew I could hide out here in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of people who are inarguably worse than me. And that worked out okay for eight years or so, except I met some decent people in the Blinds. Some good people. Despite their pasts.” Cooper clears his throat, his voice catching. He starts up again: “Then, two months ago, I murdered Errol Colfax.”
The crowd murmurs, shocked, it’s unmistakable.