The Lesson of Her Death

aren’t what they are in the city. You could walk, hunt, fish on almost anybody’s land for miles around. As long as you left it in good shape, as long as the feeling was reciprocal, nobody made an issue.
    Corde ducked under the wire fence, and slipped into the scruffy forest behind his property. He continued fora ways then broke out into a clearing in the center of which was a huge rock some glacier had left behind, twenty feet high and smooth as a trout’s skin. Corde clambered onto the rock and sat in one of the indentations on the west side.
    She wears a turquoise sweater high at the neck, half obscuring her fleshy throat.
    To the south he could just see a charcoal gray roof, which seemed attached to a stand of adolescent pines though in fact it covered his own house. He noticed the discolored patch near the chimney where he had replaced the shingles last summer.
    “You used to live in St. Louis, didn’t you?” Jennie Gebben asks.
    Oh, she is pretty! Hair straight and long. Abundant breasts under the soft cloth. Sheer white stockings under the black jeans. She wears no shoes and he sees through the thin nylon red-nailed toes exceptionally long.
    “Well, I did,” he answers. “As a matter of fact.” He clears his throat. He feels the closeness of the dormitory room. He smells incense. He smells spicy perfume.
    “Eight, nine years ago? I was little then but weren’t you in the news or something?”
    “All cops get on the air at one time or another. Press conference or something. Drug bust.”
    Saturday night, January a year ago, branches click outside the dormitory window. Bill Corde sits on a chair and Jennie Gebben tucks her white-stockinged feet under her legs and lies back on the bed.
    “It seems it was something more than that,” she says. “More than a press conference. Wait. I remember. It was …”
    She stops speaking.
    Bill Corde, sitting now on the flesh-smooth rock in the quiet town of New Lebanon, watched the sun grow lower to the horizon through a high tangle of brush and hemlock and young oaks soon to die from light starvation.
    Shots fired! Shots fired! Ten-thirty-three. Unit to respond
.…
    Each inch the sun fell, each thousand miles the earth turned away from it, he sensed the forest waking. Smells grew: loam, moss, leaves from last fall decomposing, bitter bark, musk, animal droppings.
    … this session of the St. Louis Police Department Shooting Review Board. Incident number 84-403. Detective Sergeant William Corde, assigned to St. Louis County Grand Larceny, currently suspended from duty pending the outcome of this hearing
.…
    Corde thought he’d be happy just being a hunter. He would have liked to live in the 1800s. Oh, there was a lot that amused and appealed to him about the Midwest at the end of the twentieth century. Like pickup trucks and televised Cardinals and Cubs games and pizza and computers and noncorrosive gunpowder. But if you asked him to be honest he’d say that he’d forgo it all to wake up one morning and walk downstairs to find Diane in front of a huge fireplace making johnnycakes in the beehive oven, then he and Jamie would go out to trap or hunt all day long among the miles and miles of forests just like this one.
    A. Well, sir, the perpetrators
…
    Q. You knew them to be armed with assault rifles?
    A. Not with assault rifles, no, though we knew they were armed.… The perpetrators had taken the cash and jewelry and were still inside the store. I ordered my men into the alley behind the store. It was my intention to enter through a side door and take them by surprise
.
    Corde listened to the snapping of some invisible animal making its way through the woods. He thought how odd it was that a creature was moving past him, probably no more than ten feet away, yet he sensed no danger. He felt if anything the indifference of the surroundings, as if he had been discounted by nature as something insignificant and not worth harming.
    Q. Sergeant Corde, could you tell us then what happened?
    A. Yes, sir. There were a number of exit doors leading from the stores into the alley. I had inadvertently told the men to enter through door 143
.
    Q. Inadvertently?
    A. That was a mistake. The door that opened onto the jewelry store was number 134. I
—
    Q. You mixed up the numbers?
    A. Yes, sir. In speaking with the fire inspector, he had told me the correct number of the door. I had written it down. But when I radioed to the men which door to enter, I read it