Warpath

Ann Long Memorial.

The waiting room is small; quaint. Clevenger sits next to his ninety-two-year-old grandfather in a room where the walls are a psychologically calming hue of white, the gentle pattern of the carpet, carefully designed to avoid the appearance of being busy. Busy designs can irritate a person. Irate people take death notifications worse than calm people. Clevenger’s grandfather looks calm. Defeated, but calm. His face, a formerly empty palette now scribbled by the hard pressings of being stunned. Stupefied. Numb and overwhelmed.

What a night. One minute you’re sleeping next to the woman who you’ve been married to for so long you have to work to unearth a memory without her in it, and the next moment your house is alive with gunfire and screaming and bleeding out. Alive with death, that dirty whore pulling her veil of eternal sleep over your spouse.

Clevenger’s grandfather is named Willibald, which impresses me just because he sounds like a legendary medieval swordsman. But now as I walk into the gulf of sorrow that fills the small room, he’s a man who was proud five hours ago and broken now.

Clevenger looks up, his eyes a hard question. The thirst for revenge that floats to the top of a person’s eyes, like the hunger of lust I have seen in other men’s eyes, it occupies his face.

I nod. Half-smile.

Graham Clevenger exhales, long. He’s been holding that particular breath since he got the word. Exhaling, the first time he has since the bullets ripped apart his family. He’s got his arm around his wife Molly. He shrugs and pulls her tighter. She sees me, smiles. Lovely. I don’t know if she fakes it or not, but when she smiles at me I feel welcome. If Graham were my son, Molly would make me proud as a daughter-in-law.

“Come. Sit with us.” Molly is on the end of the waiting room couch. She reaches across Graham and pats the open seat. She grips her tissue a little tighter in one small hand, streaks of sorrow-black mascara cutting tiger stripes across it.

I near the open seat, see Willibald. The old man looks up to me, his eyes void of tears but only because he hails from a generation who still does those things in private.

“Hello, Richard,” his voice, nails and ash.

“Hello,” I say, look at Graham. He nods ever so slightly. I turn back to Willibald. “If it eases something inside, I heard from some cop-buddies that the men who did this got the address wrong. They went south of the river to get it right and were killed during the drive-by.”

I rub my face. “The shooter is in a body bag. Maybe two.”

“Did he have a wife?” Willibald asks, looking down at his gruff hands. “Do shitheads like that still respect marriage?”

“No.”

He looks up to me, his face as honest a

s a child’s. “You were married once, am I right?”

“Yes. Widowed.”

He looks away and that word, widowed, it floats through the air like a spider’s web and settles down upon him. It has him now; that definition fits his life. Widower.

“We have that in common, I guess. How does it work?”

I’ve spent my life pondering that. “It made me believe in God.”

“You didn’t before then?”

“If you met my parents you wouldn’t either.”

“Why then? After He took away your other half, why then did you believe in Him?”

Molly reaches across Graham and pats my hand, as if, since she is the only living wife in our circle, she has to somehow fill a spiritual gap. “Two reasons. The first is because I need her. She is gone in this life, but in the next I keep hearing promises from the Holy Bible she’ll be around. So I want there to be a heaven so I may have her again.”

“I see,” he says, looking off into some great distance that is beyond the waiting room wall. I can see he hopes that as well. To be reunited. A secret desire. Without facing me he says, “And the second reason you believe in God?”

“So I can get my hands on Him for doing that in the first place.”

“You say that with conviction.”

“I mean it with conviction.”

After some time of being quiet, visiting with the doctor, people in and out, Graham taking some cell phone calls about the second crime scene, my best friend steps out of the room.

Molly rustles through her purse. “I need a coffee. Anybody else want one?”