The Lesson of Her Death

backwards
.
    Q. So the men entered the mall through the wrong door
.
    A. No, they tried to. But that door was locked. As they were trying to get it open, thinking it was the correct door, the perpetrators ran into the alley and fired on the policemen. Their backs
—
    Q. Whose backs?
    A. The policemen’s backs were to the perpetrators. Two police officers were killed and two were wounded
.
    Q. Have the perpetrators been apprehended?
    A. To date, one has. The rest have not
.
    He’d been suspended with half pay for six months but he quit the force a week before reinstatement. He sat around in his suburban home, thinking about the men who’d died, thinking of the kind of jobs he ought to get, replaying the incident a hundred times then a thousand times. He stopped going to church and didn’t even have the inclination to turn a bar or the bottle into his personal chapel. He spent his time with the TV, doing some security jobs, some construction work. Finally the mortgage payments on the trim suburban split-level outran their savings and with Sarah on the way they’d had no choice but to come back to New Lebanon.
    Feed and grain, planing and sawing, teaching.… Long, long days. Then he’d seen the ad in the paper for a deputy and he’d applied.
    After Bill and Diane had moved back to New Lebanon he had five years with his father before the stroke.Five full years of opportunities to talk about what happened at the Fairway Mall. But what the two men spent those years on was pheasant loads and movies and carburetors and memories of their wife and mother.
    One day, a month before the blood clot swapped a clear, complicated mind for one that was infinitely simple, Corde was crouched down, sharpening a mower blade in his father’s garage. He heard the footsteps and he looked up to see the old man standing hunched and pale, licking the top of a Dannon yogurt container. His father said, “’Bout time we deal with St. Louis, wouldn’t you say?” Corde stood, his knee popping and pushing him oh-so-slowly upward. He turned to face his father and cleared his throat. The elder Corde said solemnly, “Ten bucks says they’ll cave to New York.” Corde rolled grass flecks off his hands and dug into his pocket for a bill. “You’re on,” he said. His father wandered into the yard while Corde turned back to the iron blade in complete remorse.
    Q. If someone else had read the number of the door to the policemen in the alley, the mishap might not have happened. Or if you had taken your time and read the number slowly?
    A. (garbled)
    Q. Could you repeat that please
.
    A. The mishap probably would not have happened, no
.
    He’d never told anyone in New Lebanon. The facts were there, somewhere in his file in St. Louis. If Steve Ribbon or Hammerback Ellison or Jim Slocum or Addie Kraskow of the
Register
wanted to go to the trouble to look it up, they would find everything. But the New Lebanon Sheriff’s Department simply glanced at his résumé and believed the truthful statement that the reason for termination from his last job was that he’d quit. They believed too his explanation that he had grown tired of fighting city riverfront crime and had wanted to move back to his peaceful home town. After all, he had a six-year-old son and a baby on the way.
    Who’d think to look beyond that?
    Another snap, nearby. Corde turned. The animal materialized. A buck. He saw two does not far off. He loved watching them. They were elegant in motion but when they stopped—always as if they were late for something vitally important and had time to give you just a brief look—they were completely regal. Corde wished he was a poet. He wanted badly to put into words what he felt at this moment: The knowledge in the deer’s eyes.
    The melting sun.
    The unseen movement of the woods at dusk.
    The total sorrow when you fall short of the mark that you know God’s set for you.
    With a single crack of wet wood, the deer were gone. Bill Corde scooted off the rock and slowly made his way to his twentieth-century home, with his pickup truck and television, and his family.

S PECIAL TO THE R EGISTER —Two days after the slaying of a second Auden University co-ed by the man known as the “Moon Killer,” John Treadle, Harrison County Supervisor, ordered Sheriff’s Department deputies to step up nighttime patrols around New Lebanon.
    “But,” he said, “I can’t emphasize enough that girls shouldn’t travel by themselves after dark until we