The Interloper Read online

  Copyright © 2007 Antoine Wilson

  Production Editor: Mira S. Park

  This book was set in 11.5 pt ACaslon by Alpha Graphics of Pittsfield, NH.

  eISBN: 978-1-59051-551-8

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 2 Park Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Wilson, Antoine.

  The interloper / Antoine Wilson.

  p. cm.

  1. Murder victims’ families–Fiction. 2. Prisoners–Fiction. 3. Revenge–Fiction. I.

  Title.

  PS3623.I5778I67 2007

  813′.54–dc22

  2006014546

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  v3.1

  To Chrissy

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to Eric Bennett, Connie Brothers, Dana Goodyear, Brigid Hughes, Rosanna Levinson, Jack Livings, James Alan McPherson, Zoe Pagnamenta, Carol Houck Smith, John Woodward, and my parents. Also, for their generous support, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, where I was fortunate to spend a year as the Carol Houck Smith Fellow in Fiction Writing.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Passing stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you,

  You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking, (it comes to me, as of a dream,)

  I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,

  All is recall’d as we flit by each other, fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured,

  You grew up with me, were a boy with me, or a girl with me,

  I ate with you, and slept with you, your body has become not yours only nor left my body mine only,

  You give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as we pass, you take of my beard, breast, hands, in return,

  I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone or wake at night alone,

  I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again,

  I am to see to it that I do not lose you.

  —WALT WHITMAN, To a Stranger

  1

  My name is Owen Patterson. I am thirty-eight years old. I am in fine shape medically and psychologically. I have been checked out on both counts. Despite my being far away from her, and my not having talked to her for several months now, I remain married to Patricia Patterson, née Stocking. We have no children. I consider myself a civilized person, probably around 80% acclimated to the society in which I lived, if not more. A solid B. I miss working for the software company. Life had a nice routine to it. Software manuals are pleasingly logical when written right, and we used to write them right. If I could wake up from this bad dream, I would wake up in my cubicle at the software company, face creased from the edge of a binder, and ask mouth-breathing Neil, in the next cubicle over, if he wanted to get some coffee downstairs.

  They won’t give me access to any of my files or letters. This account is an escape hatch that opens into deep water. If the man who murdered Patty’s brother had been executed for his crime, if our justice system had been just, we might have been able to move on, we might have continued in a state of normalcy, however fragile. But the soil of our marriage was poisoned. Not by her brother’s murder. By the twenty-odd-year sentence handed down to the man who had taken CJ’s life. Twenty years—three square meals a day, a warm place to rest, friends and associates of like criminal mind—for taking CJ away forever.

  I was present at the sentencing. I was the stiff man in the blue suit on whose lapel the victim’s sister quietly sobbed. Calvin Senior and I were two pillars of male strength, and we supported our weeping wives, as it was supposed to be. There was no admission of guilt from Henry Joseph Raven, no apology to the family, just a smile and a wink to a woman in the gallery as they led him away. He had no idea what he had done to the Stockings. He did not care, and the Stockings could see this, and there was no finality. The world was an unbalanced equation—you could write it down, it was there in front of you on paper, but it was fundamentally wrong.

  Over a year after Henry Raven had been put away, Patty sat at the Stocking family dinner table with her parents, with me. She wore all black. There was no continuity between the Patty I’d married and the Patty whose brother had been murdered. The soil had been poisoned. We sleepwalked through our lives. She worked the night shift at the pharmaceutical company, I wrote software documentation, half at the office, half at home. We saw each other when we could. I once snuck out to Patty’s work to surprise her. In the lab she wore a sterile suit, and I was desperate to see her in something that wasn’t black. I couldn’t get past security. If I had known how, I would have paid someone to kill Henry Raven in prison.

  That night at dinner, I was optimistic for the first time in months. After a false start I will relate below, I had stumbled across a means by which Raven would suffer appropriately for his crime, a way to tip the scales, bring things back to normal, show the Stockings that justice had been done, that CJ’s death had not been met with a wink and a smile, but with just punishment.

  First, dinner. Every family comprises a little metaphysical universe, and the addition or subtraction of a member can throw off the balance completely. Despite the fact that the Stockings had lost CJ—he was murdered while Patty and I were on our honeymoon—they’d gained me. I sat in his seat, but I did not possess the same appetite he did. CJ was known for his ability to eat seconds and thirds at every meal. I am a slow eater, due to some scar tissue in my esophagus I have never had repaired; also, I could not stand Minerva’s cooking. Everything was unsalted—for the benefit of Calvin Senior’s heart—and the only salt on the table was potassium salt, which was not salt. Patty had grown up on bland food, and had attuned her taste buds to it, while I had grown up foraging in my aunt and uncle’s kitchen (tortilla chips, corn dogs) and couldn’t taste Minerva’s flavorless cooking.

  Calvin Stocking Senior was big and silent, bearish not in terms of hairiness but of his long and lumbering body, upon which had been placed a small head. At dinner, he still wore his tie from work, and the way the flesh of his thick neck bulged above his starched white coll
ar reminded me of those dogs whose skulls are too small for their brains. Minerva Stocking was the rounder of the two, not fat so much as plump, and she could be depended upon to wear various mystical stones, crystals, turquoise and the like, to accentuate her suburban outfits. If she had not talked, dinner would have been quiet. She was a great believer in signs. She gave me a card not long after CJ’s death that said “Everything Happens For A Reason—American Proverb.” A number of highly successful people are deeply susceptible to signs, and I have come to believe that many of them use this technique in order to commune with their unconscious minds. I have tried it from time to time, but find that my ego, if there is such a thing, will not let go easily. Her permanent subject was her murdered son. Phrases like “CJ would have loved this” and “If only CJ were here to see this” poured out in a steady stream of talk. Calvin Senior joined her in the talk, never enthusiastic but also never reluctant.

  It was not the custom of my family to speak of the dead for too long after they were gone. When my cousin Eileen died, we established a tacit agreement that after the mourning period had come to an end, we would no longer speak of her unduly. We did this out of consideration for each other, to put the mourning behind us. Or, more accurately, to keep it bottled within us, hidden away, to reappear only when someone spoke tactlessly and scraped the old wound, or in dreams. To bring her up was to risk rousing emotions. Patty’s family was not afraid of emotions; theirs came out in Little Stocking Pieces instead of Frustrated Patterson Outbursts.

  “Tonight we’re having CJ’s favorite,” Minerva announced from the kitchen, “T-bone steak and new potatoes.”

  Even as I began to gain control over my physical responses to this talk about the dead, even as I felt like I was getting used to it, I shivered at every mention of CJ. They would never finish talking about him.

  Minerva looked at me across the table and asked what I thought of the tahini dressing.

  I smiled and said, “What goes into that, exactly? I might want to throw some together at home.”

  She listed ingredients and ran down some preparation instructions, which I forgot immediately. Patty knew what I was doing. She called it “baiting” her mother. She was highly attuned—possibly overattuned—to insincerity. Her mother suffered from no such sensitivity.

  “Tell my parents how work is going,” said Patty.

  “We’re doing a total revision of a manual for our accounting software. My boss wants to go head-to-head with the third-party manuals. I’m not sure why. It’s a lot of writing.”

  “You know CJ used to write,” Minerva said.

  “He did not,” Patty said.

  “Now, now,” said Calvin Senior, “let your mother speak.”

  “Writing was his favorite subject. We used to get all kinds of notes from his English teachers, talking about how creative his papers were. Now, they weren’t always supposed to be creative, but leave it to CJ. He was irre—something—ible that way.”

  “Irresponsible?” I offered.

  “Irrepressible,” said Patty.

  “Yes. That.”

  Typically, Minerva brought him up, Patty resisted, and Calvin Senior let it be known that they were going to talk about what Minerva wanted to talk about. After which Patty eased into CJ-talk herself.

  I was a fresh audience, an opportunity to build CJ from the ground up. I had already begun hearing repeated stories. In some ways I was becoming one of them. Except I felt little sense of loss, vis-à-vis CJ. I had only met him in person a few times. Since I had gotten to know him through stories, I hadn’t really lost anything. The stories kept coming.

  The Stockings never talked about the murder. They found a way to bring CJ’s memory into just about any conversation, but the murder itself was taboo. They never mentioned Henry Joseph Raven. He had become just another manifestation of a generalized evil force that existed “out there.” They simply missed CJ, as if he had died in a car accident or scaffolding collapse. I suppose they had some ideas about vengeance corrupting the soul.

  Here’s what I pieced together from the newspapers and the trial: CJ had been drinking in a seedy restaurant-bar in the Rockies called Diana’s Grill, not far from where he attended college. His girlfriend had broken up with him, and he’d gone to Diana’s to drown his sorrows. The toilet had overflowed earlier in the evening, so when nature called, he went out back to relieve himself, as was the local custom. There, he encountered two men, Henry Joseph Raven and his accomplice, Hoden Broadbent Murray. The men abducted CJ from the dirt lot behind the bar and took him to his Chevy Blazer. They drove him to a remote location in the mountains, some seventy-five miles away. There, Henry Raven shot CJ in the back of the head and left his body in some trees by the side of the road. Murray, upon hearing the gunshot, panicked and fled the scene in the Blazer. He had the foresight to reset the trip odometer. If he hadn’t, they might never have found CJ’s body. That courtesy, along with his willingness to testify against Raven, earned him a lesser charge. Raven was apprehended a week later. His story, that the three men had been partying together all night, and that he had not been present when CJ was shot, was contradicted by several witnesses, prime among them his former accomplice, Murray. But Murray had struck a deal with the prosecutors, and had every reason to bend the story to his advantage. Prosecutors had to hang the case on forensics, matching the lead of the bullet found in CJ with the lead of bullets discovered at Raven’s home. In the end, Raven’s strategy of denial meant the difference between the death penalty and a twenty-some-year stint with the possibility of parole. In the library’s newspaper database, I cross-referenced “Henry Joseph Raven” and “miscarriage of justice.” My search returned fourteen hits, all opinion pages from Colorado and California newspapers.

  Minerva stood over the serving dish. “Seconds?” she asked.

  My plate was nowhere near clean; as a matter of fact, I was still cutting and chewing my dinner. “It’s delicious,” I said.

  “I wondered if you want some more?”

  I looked at my plate.

  “Can I get back to you on that?”

  Patty intervened. “He’s still eating, Mom. They’re not seconds if the firsts aren’t done yet.”

  Minerva remained over the dish. “I just didn’t want his plate to go empty.” She gestured with a large two-pronged fork. “Besides, there’s still a nice big piece of steak left. Someone’s going to have to eat it.”

  Calvin Senior looked up. He had tolerated his wife’s flavorless cooking since the doctor said he should cut down his salt intake, and he had never complained about it once. But he wasn’t going to go as far as taking these leftovers to work.

  “I’ve got lunch at the club tomorrow,” he said.

  “We’re having a catered meeting,” Patty said.

  Minerva turned to me. What could I say? I was working at home the next day. I would either eat it now or then. “I’d be happy to take it home for lunch, if you’re willing to wrap it up.”

  She frowned and turned toward the kitchen with the dish.

  “Mom!” Patty looked at her sternly. “We’re still eating.”

  I scanned the table. Calvin Senior had finished, as had Patty. Minerva’s plate was empty save a bone and a few gristly bits. I was still eating. Not we. I.

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “It is not okay,” said Patty. “It is rude to get up from the table before everyone has finished.”

  “I’m almost there, anyway, and I’m a slow eater. Happens all the time.”

  “It’s a matter of principle.”

  It was not a matter of principle, exactly. Patty could become stubborn, ornery, obtuse, and downright rude whenever coming to my defense. She would ignore a thousand flaming arrows shot in her direction, but if a pebble landed at my feet, she would cry foul. Her loyalty to me was a badge of pride, and as such, it didn’t always conform to reality. It disturbed me that this one component of our love had survived while so many others had fallen by the wayside.
This person, who in so many ways no longer resembled the woman I married—who wore nothing but black, who had switched to work the night shift, who rejected my clumsy attempts at intimacy—this person clung to the detritus of our early love the way a castaway clings to a waterlogged mast.

  “We’re not finished eating,” Patty said.

  Minerva sat down. She knew she could not win this battle. I ate as quickly as I could, which due to my medical condition was not exceedingly quick. I tried, between bites, while the food was making its way around the curves and bumps of my scarred esophagus, to keep the conversation going.

  “What we need here,” I said, “is CJ. He would have eaten up this stuff lickety-split.”

  They all stared at their plates. I expected some laughter, a jump-started anecdote.

  “He would have though, right?” I asked. “I mean, the kid could eat.”

  “Please just finish,” Patty said.

  After dinner Calvin Senior and I ended up in the den while Patty and her mother occupied themselves in the kitchen. Normally the four of us would have stayed together in the kitchen or the den, but that night we had rented Vertigo, and the boys had been assigned the task of prepping the video machine while the girls put together desserts. Setting up the video took only a moment. In an attempt to find some common ground with Calvin Senior, I tried to talk sports with him, but I was never much of a sports person, and so I ended up feeling as if I were a boy picking up his daughter for a first date. Though he had begun to warm to me somewhat, calling me “son” now and then—with a wink I never understood—I always felt a gap between myself and this bear of a man. Patty and her mother thought of him as a large, docile, cuddly creature, but I saw the claws, and I saw that he was not afraid to display them to me at opportune moments. Life with his wife and daughter was a sort of act, an act he found pleasant to immerse himself in while also maintaining other acts for, say, the men at the club, or the secretaries at the office. The act he’d reserved for me had not really changed since I’d started dating Patty. There was something mildly distasteful in his getting chummy with the man who was intimate with his daughter and had such great potential to hurt her by turning out to be just another asshole. All men were assholes. The art of being a man was in acting like a gentleman and saving the frat boy crap for places like the club. I knew I could never replace Calvin Junior. Every time CJ was invoked, I felt that I was some sort of inadequate stand-in, a changeling, a pretender. My father-in-law did little to make this feeling go away.