A Purpose In Liquidity

by William G. Schweizer

Part 1 appears
in this issue.

conclusion

I spoke with an unintentional quaver. “I’m sorry. I can’t explain this for you. I thought you might explain it to me.”

She seemed unsurprised. “I thought there was something odd about that boot. It fell out of a big scoop of wet mud just as dry and clean as it is there.”

“Can I borrow it from you?”

“Take it. You seem to be the owner. Just let me know when you figure it all out.”

Before heading upstate I stopped by my sister’s home thinking she might have a theory, since she was slightly older and much wiser.

I plopped the nylon suitcase on the floor, unzipped it, and took out the two black boots, folding them open while being careful not to flake any mud on the carpet.

Kathryn’s eyes widened, and she blushed as she did when she was stressed or embarrassed. “Your cowboy boots. My God, where did you get them?”

“What makes you think they’re mine?”

She took a long time to answer. “Let me make you some tea while I think about this.” She bustled in the kitchen and then came and sat looking at the boots.

“You were four years old and you loved cowboys. You had the hat, the vest, chaps and cap pistols, of course. All you needed was the boots. A man, I forget his name, rented a room from the Miller family next door. He liked you, and, when he moved away, he gave you those boots.

“They were not exactly cowboy boots and were a man’s size but you loved them. You would have worn them to bed and a few times you tried. You used to clomp and stomp around, the boots flopping because they were too big.”

She continued. “You remember the back yard fronted the little canal. There was a straight bulkhead and some boats moored to weights on pulleys.

“One afternoon, I think it might have been October, everyone was watching the World Series on the Millers’ television. They had the only set in the neighborhood. Looking out her side window, Mrs. Miller, she hated baseball, she saw you walking in the boots on top of the pilings. You lost footing and fell into the canal.

“She hollered for help, but it was as if you had vanished from the face of the earth. The men rowed up and down the canal, and the Larsen boys put on masks and dove in the canal to look on the bottom. You were gone. The police were there, and Fire and Rescue too. You couldn’t be found. They thought it might be a hoax or that you were kidnapped or even floated out into the main channel. No one knew what to do next. It happened to be a day of new moon and the tide went out dead low. When the mud started to show on each side of the canal they found you.

“The police guessed that you had fallen and struck your head and been knocked out and then wedged between the boat and the bulkhead. That’s why they couldn’t see you. As the water level dropped you went under the boat. When the tide was all out, the boat came to rest on top of you.

“One of the older boys saw two boots sticking out from under the boat and immediately everyone was trying to shift the boat without harming you. If the mud had not been spongy and soft you might have been crushed.” She stopped, went to get the tea and returned.

“As it was you were pretty badly hurt. You had cracked ribs and a torn knee cartilage and, well, hard to describe, not quite a coma, but for two weeks you were more than asleep, not with us, ‘somewhere else’; that’s how Mom described it.

“Dr. Ben came every night, and nobody was sure if you would ever wake. Then one morning you woke everyone else, turning the house upside down looking for those damned boots. Of course nobody had given a thought to the boots. We figured they had been left next to the boat and washed out with the tide into the main channel. Where in hell did you find them?”

I had my own question. “Why didn’t anyone ever tell me this?”

“Nobody wanted to think about it. You came out okay, but it was awful. They literally had to dig you out of the mud with garden spades. And you know how the neighborhood parents were about the water. Lots of kids almost drowned. A couple actually did. It was not something to press in a memory book.”

We drank our tea. I picked up the boots again, folded the soft tops and placed them in the suitcase.

“That’s quite a story. Glad I don’t remember any of that happening, but I don’t think these can be the same boots.”

Anyway, it was time to travel upstate.

I postponed thinking about any of Kathryn’s story to stay focused on the deposition, When that chore was done I sorely needed to decompress before pointing the rental car south. I opened all the windows to show myself that Southern California hadn’t made me go soft, and I headed east, driving as though I knew just where I was going.

I sat or rather just stooped near the bank of the stream, which was not wide but swift and powerful, like the outgoing tide. The cold of the air and the boiling hiss of the stream were soothing, and I lost track of time.

“This is private property.” A voice from behind.

Turning I saw a tall man in a sheepskin coat and an ersatz sable Russian hat. Every criminal and every lawyer can recognize a cop no matter what they’re wearing.

“Got some I.D.?”

“Sure.” I showed my license and Bar card. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to trespass. My folks once came close to buying this place, and I just took a drive to see if my memory was good enough to find it. That was almost twelve years ago. Doesn’t seem like there has been too much interest since.”

“No, not much. The site is beautiful. You sitting here in the cold is mute proof of that fact. The property is a good size, a full acre, just a little too remote in winter for most people. Scares them off.”

I looked around. “It’s January now, and I don’t see any snow. What’s so scary?”

“This is just to fool West Coasters like you. Most years it’ll be white on the ground from November to April. Sorry about the interrogation, Counselor. I thought I recognized you, and when a cop recognizes someone, he’s usually thinking villain. Buy you a cup of coffee?”

I nodded.

We took the police car three miles up the road to a diner. The chief coded for a break, and we sat down in an almost empty room. He was a talker in search of an audience and stuck to local color but no crime talk.

He started with the geology of the area, then Paleo-Indian history followed by Woodland Indian history, followed by Dutch, English and the Robber Baron era. He never did get to the twentieth century, switching the subject to fishing, hunting and the racing season at Saratoga. It seemed like he wanted to go in a certain direction but didn’t know the way.

My host hadn’t let me talk, but, despite the California I.D., he pegged me for an Islander.

“Lived down there myself a long time, but I like it here better. Too flat there, too busy, and too wet. Yeah, too wet.” He stopped for a moment and stared into his empty coffee cup.

“Who am I kidding? I can’t go back. I’m here in exile, a Flying Dutchman driving endlessly back and forth between Saratoga and Vermont.”

Wow.

He looked up. “Do you mind if I ramble a bit?”

“Ramble away.”

“It was really by chance that I came up here. You know how people are on the Island. They never leave. It was a solo vacation. My wife had gone to Boston for a friend’s wedding, the shower and the preparations. I was supposed to catch up.

“Connie’s mother came to stay and watch our son. Gene was four years old. Connie’s mother suggested a trip upstate to see the fall color. It was the first week of October, Indian summer, and the idea seemed appealing. I thought I was in the way. That’s how I came up here. I thought I would hike toward the Vermont border, watch the leaves turn, sleep out, stomp around the woods, and harass the owls.

“It turned out better than that, and I really did have a terrific time. I even found an arrowhead that a professor over at Skidmore said might be 7,000 years old. Imagine that. ‘Made by the Clovis culture’ she said.” He looked out into the woods and went silent for a moment.

“I had no premonition, no sense of anything wrong. In fact it was really one of the great times of my life. Away from a telephone for a week, what could have been better? But when I got back to my car there was the Park Ranger waiting with the local police. Same Department I work for now. They knew I was on the job in Nassau. Cops talking to a cop. Sympathetic, supportive, but blunt.

“My son had died. Drowned in the neighbors’ yard. Fallen into a miniature lily pond no bigger than a kitchen sink. He had wandered off they thought. Big search. Went on for days. Then the neighbor noticed something sticking out of the plants. A hand. A foot maybe. But, by then it didn’t matter. He was gone somewhere else.

“I went back to the Island, but what marriage or what family survives such a thing. I couldn’t function. Some nut, a college kid, had been calling me about another drowning, and it made me crazy. I left the Department and came back here. I roamed the woods for a while and out of habit went back to being a cop. I got a little bit interested in local archaeology, maybe an impulse against letting things stay buried.”

He stood up. “I don’t know what’s got into me. I haven’t talked this much in a long time. And I’ve never talked about that time to anyone. You’re a good cross-examiner, Counselor.”

I had hardly spoken at all. “Why beat yourself up? What could you have done?”

“I could have found him. If I had been near a phone instead of traipsing the woodlands I could have told somebody immediately where he was before he sank under the water.”

“How could you possibly have known where he was?”

“I knew. I knew exactly. When I was seventeen I lived for six months with my aunt on a small canal off the East Rockaway Channel. Maybe you know the area. A kid on our street fell in the drink. We looked there, in the canal, but before long we were looking in garages, taking boats into the channel, going door-to-door blocks away.

“We finally found him twenty feet from his own back door and exactly where someone has seen him fall. He was covered with mud and knocked goofy, but he was right where he had fallen. So I knew where my boy was. Just twenty feet from our back door. Trouble was you had to look below the surface, and I was the only one who knew that.”

He drove me back to my rented car. Shaking hands he pressed his card in my palm. “Stop by again when you’re in the neighborhood. Seriously. Maybe I’ll find out what they’re asking for the house.” I looked at his card still without speaking. He spoke last pointing to his card. “That’s with two f’s.”

The drive from Saratoga back to JFK was a blur, and the sound of the radio was just noise. The steel colored sky had turned leaden and then became carbon, nighttime, a good time to fly west.

The plane landed an hour early, and I escaped long term in record time. I tried not to wake Linda getting into bed. I expected to sleep until 9 o’clock, but at 4 a.m. I woke up thrashing. “Sorry Hon’, I must be still keyed up from the flight.”

“What flight are you talking about? Are you alright?”

“The flight back from New York.”

“Are you still dreaming? You don’t go to New York until the 15th. Are you having flying anxiety again?”

I went into the closet where I had hung my shirt over the back of a chair. I could feel the business card in the pocket right where I expected it to be. But there was rebuttal evidence. Linda had slid open the drawer of my nightstand and pulled out a crisp unused plane ticket, LAX to JFK for the 15th.

Now to check downstairs where I had left the suitcase when I came in. No suitcase. Rummaging in the garage I found the suitcase and opened it. Inside no clothes, no suits, no socks, just a pair of boots, black western style boots.

Upstairs I checked the shirt again and took out the card, which was wrinkled and soft as though carried around for years rather than hours. I went back to bed.

“Are you still fidgety? Are you alright?”

“Yeah. I’m O.K. Hey, did I ever tell you about the time a boat fell on me, I was buried alive, and was in a coma for two weeks?”

“No, but that would explain a great deal. Now you should really try to sleep.” She tried and succeeded.

The only one left awake in the house, I lay still and tried to mentally reconstruct the last three days, but the effort was too taxing and my thoughts quickly disorganized as my mind trudged toward sleep.

As I slept, I dreamed of an autumn morning, peaceful and familiar, with gray skies arching above an endless prospect of pale green marsh grass rustling gently from the motion of the tide draining toward the open sea.

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