KILLERS by Robert Pope

The prize photo in the Sunday Magazine of our local paper confused me; at first I registered only a general outline of the image and a caption: Dog Walks Man. I had to study the photo a moment before I understood why the skin across the back of my head tightened. I noticed the enormous dog in the photo was a Harlequin Dane a minute or two before I realized it was my own Charley. This meant that the grotesquely thin, short man in a light blue sport coat and large round glasses had to be me.
Several weeks had passed since the occasion of the photograph – it was now considerably colder in Akron – but I did remember signing a release, believing the picture would never appear anywhere. Here it was, and it startled me that I should be a subject of interest to anyone, much less the object of a prize. I think of myself not as subject but observer, more or less, of the lives of others. I tore it out of the paper and stuck it on my refrigerator with a magnet in the shape of the Ohio state flag.
One of my weaknesses is that I am charmed by interesting men, even more enchanted by an interesting woman. Resulting entanglements can lay waste to weeks, months, and leave scars on my heart and mind that never quite heal. I admit, however, I am not often terribly successful in attempts at relationships – especially when I care too quickly, as I did with Jane Carmen, the entanglement that ended with the photograph in the Sunday Magazine.
I had all but forgotten – this became painfully obvious as I looked at the picture – that one reason these attempts fail is the way I look, always something of a humiliation to me. I do manage to forget that for long periods, and I usually connect with those to whom my appearance does not at first seem to matter, for reasons of their own. Jane Carmen was a bit beautiful and a bit distracted. I had actually noticed her pacing the sidewalks of Highland Square for a couple of weeks before I actually met her. She came in behind me at a home-grown Akron coffee shop I favor because it is not part of a national chain.
I had on a light zippered jacket I bought at a summer sale and had been waiting to wear for months – yellow with an embroidered horse and rider on the breast. While the counterman made my cappuccino, I looked back at her face, which hung slack, though her brown eyes darted, looking at baked goods behind glass. She wore an attractive slate blue trench coat, belted at the waist, her hands resting lightly in the pockets. Distracted as she was, she didn’t notice me right away, but when she did she seemed taken aback. She looked in my watching eyes with a blank expression, as if waiting for an explanation, as if she said, “What?”
I blushed, looked at my shoes, but I couldn’t keep from going back to the face waiting behind me with a silent, unprejudiced demand for an explanation. I hoped that I could think of something to say that would allow us to laugh and return to our lives, but I had nothing. Words I could not say erupted and died in my mouth before they became speech. In a burst of failure, I heard the shameful words in my ear before I knew I had said them: “You have a nice face.”
She gave a mechanical laugh for answer and brushed her straight hair away from her face on one side. Her lips moved slightly, a gesture that – for some reason I cannot explain – went straight to my heart. I found it difficult to turn away, pay my bill and take my drink. I lowered my head and hurried out to the ding of a bell attached to the door. When I looked back through the window, she was speaking to the counterman but glanced in my direction. I was shaking as I stepped onto the sidewalk, my own voice in my mind telling me to beat a hasty retreat. I wiped my eye and found it wet. I stood my ground because I could not move. When I think how such a brief human confrontation can affect us I have to laugh, though my laughter is forced. There she was, coming out of the coffee shop with a paper cup in her hand, like mine.
This time she didn’t look at me but turned left rapidly; I had to very nearly run to catch up. She looked without surprise when I walked beside her. My mind spun to think of things to say until I gave up and told her my name, where I lived, what I was doing today, and even what church I attended. I think I wanted to calm her fears that I may have been a stalker. She listened without a word. Silence blossomed around us like something palpable. Finally, she said, “I had a son, but he died six months ago.”
She kept moving without breaking stride. It took me a minute to get over the shock that she had said something like that out of the blue, much less that such a thing happened. It came in a flash of understanding: if such a thing happened it was only reasonable that she could speak of nothing else until she spoke the truth that stood guard over anything she might allow herself to think, speak, or even consider. I had to hurry to keep pace.
“How did it happen?” I said.
She didn’t look at me. “Hit by a car,” she said, “in front of me. I let his hand go for a minute at the curb to check if I had money for an ice cream. He wanted an ice cream cone. He ran before I could grab him. A black car is all I remember, and he sped away. They never found him. I ran an ad for a month, hoping the killer would contact me.”
“How old was he?”
“Five years, five months, exactly, like a formula, five times five. On the face of it, the answer, which is twenty-five, doesn’t mean anything. Five to the fifth power is fifteen thousand six hundred and twenty-five. But five divided into five is one. Sometimes that makes sense to me. It gets bigger, then it all of a sudden small again, then it disappears.”
Though what she said made a kind of sense, this was the raving of a woman stuck in a moment of her recent past. Her craziness could be comprehended. I could have stopped and let her pass me by like an old shoe beside the road, but once I had heard this much, I could not bear to be another insensible object – a lamp post, a parking meter, a penny dropped on the sidewalk, too worthless to pick up.
“Would you like to sit down somewhere to drink our coffee?”
She glanced at the drink in her hand as if she had forgotten. Her purse was hooked over her other shoulder, one hand clutching it. I realized then that she had been sailing these streets in this manner for months; someone should stop her flight, talk to her, and it might as well be me.
We had covered territory in our brief exchange. We crossed the intersection at Portage Path onto the next block. Shops ended with an apartment building on our left, behind a retaining wall and a pale green lawn; the bank across the street on our right had a green area with a bench, beneath the statue of an Indian.
As she followed me across the street – a wide street with one lane in either direction – I held her elbow though she seemed capable of crossing without assistance. Once on the bench, we had the little activity of removing plastic lids and taking a sip to carry us through the first few seconds. She had foam on her upper lip, which made me wipe mine. She was staring into space, though it looked like she studied something across the street.
“I’m sorry for your awful loss,” I whispered, and because I didn’t know what else to do, I took another sip of my coffee.
“It’s not your fault,” she said.
I thought of telling her it wasn’t hers either, though I intuited this would be the wrong gesture and could lead into some area for which I was unprepared.
“It’s getting colder,” I said to her. My ears burned with embarrassment.
“Yes,” she whispered. “Winter’s on the way.”
It was the middle of October so we had some warmer days still coming, so I said that, though anyone who has lived here for any time at all knows how the weather goes. It seems that we always repeat these things to each other, partly to fill the time and partly to remind ourselves of where we are in the wheel of weather, so much the wheel of our fortunes.
I told her, “The I Ching tells us to remember that when times are bad better times are coming, and when times are good to remember that bad times are coming.”
She crossed her legs at the knee and leaned back a little in the bench.
“Are they coming whether we want them or not?”
I thought about that. I did not know an answer. “Don’t you want better times?”
“All I have been hoping and praying is that God would allow me to die, but he hasn’t and it doesn’t look like he’s going to do me that favor.”
I looked at the side of her face until I realized she was a complete stranger, even though I had seen her walking the streets for weeks. Like every such realization in my life, it had at least two effects: I wondered what I was doing here with her, how we came to this arrangement, and I felt shame for my inability to help her or anyone.
I had experienced this before, to be sure, perhaps not with such a burning rush, but I also experienced an anticipation of an almost sexual nature. I have a bad habit of trying to be honest about my reasons for doing what I do, but it does seem that physical attraction might be simply a factor of unavoidable biology. An atavistic part of me instinctively recognized a possibility for procreation and rose to the occasion even as a finer part recalled the commandment to love thy neighbor as thyself with a love more of fellow feeling than a sudden desire for copulation. The rhythm of my breathing became irregular as I negotiated my various selves until I could once more become whole and human. When I looked at her this time, she was looking at me. “My name is Jane Carmen,” she said.
“Frank,” I said, and then I added, “Jones, but I believe I said that already.”
“Frank Jones,” she repeated. “That’s hard to believe.”
“Nevertheless,” I said.
“Well, Frank,” she said. She released the purse she had been clutching and extended her hand. I took it, noting the surprising thinness of her fingers, a sinewy, claw-like movement in her bones, strangely intimate. For an instant I imagined naked bodies writhing in bed.
“Where are you from?” I asked. “Your voice,” I explained.
“My family lives mostly in Texas, where I grew up.”
“What brought you to Akron?” I kept her hand, ever more lightly.
“God, in his infinite wisdom, brought me here to kill my son. The man who did the bringing saw fit to leave, and the man who did the killing won’t let me go.”
I released her hand, and she stood up. “It was nice to meet you, Frank Jones.”
“And you too, Jane Carmen.”
“Was it?” she said.
I watched her walk away and toss her drink in a concrete trash can with a finality I felt through my body. A small sparrow, the size of my fist, just a common brown and beige sparrow, bounced close to my foot. I always keep a little seed in my pocket, so I dribbled it off the bench. Another sparrow careened to join the first, and I sat for a while to watch them. I felt sorry for the loss of Jane’s son and what that must have meant to her, a thing at which I could only guess. My heart ached a little, but I don’t know if we are truly able to take another’s experience as our own long enough to understand that other person. This terrible event had not happened to me.
She carried this with her every minute of her life, evidently. Everyone has a story that precedes the present; at any given moment, all of the people around you carry within them their own past, their present colored by a past they will never forget, even when it is long over.
I saw an old woman on the other side of the street with a shopping bag, carrying her own distant and immediate past in the sack. I saw others across the intersection, stepping out of pasts they had once inhabited: the young bearded man walking a little black dog, the two women deep in conversation, all living in the present of a fuse burning backwards toward death.
Jane Carmen was such a person, a woman from Texas who found herself in Akron for whatever reasons, and who remained perhaps because she could not leave the place her son died, one more person moving through her life as she must. Her physical presence remained with me, a scent of apples, the way they smelled in my lunch box in elementary school, a touch of iron-tainted water, and something else a little more feral.
I wandered home without the slightest hurry. I lived another block up Market, then a turn right on Mayfield, and then halfway down the block to a small brick house I bought because I hated apartment living, the lives of others, pressing in on me from every side. Charley met me at the door with mild interest. He is a large fellow, a Harlequin Great Dane with white and black patches, as if he were a dog seen in the shadows at night. I scratched the base of his big, soft, floppy ears while he groaned.
I made my way to the kitchen to make the bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich I had also been thinking about on my way home. Charley sat in the middle of the kitchen floor watching, as he always does when I cook. Sometimes I think that is what I like about him most, the interest he takes in whatever I do, particularly in the kitchen. He has a way of conveying wants without speech, a thing I appreciate.
What I like least about Charley is the size of his bowel movements, which I clean up with a shovel. I keep a bag of topsoil in the garage to sprinkle over spots from which I have removed one of his head-sized prizes. I don’t want to go into this more than I have to, but if there was a reason I regret getting my friend Charley, it is this alone. It is a sizable objection, but a task I have taken on for the duration – Sisyphus and his rock.
I spooned a little bacon grease on Charley’s dry cereal and crumbled a piece I fried for him on top. His jaws worked like a backhoe. Once I had cleaned up the kitchen I took him for a walk so I could enjoy the other things I like about him: his solemn happiness, his companionship, his high, bouncing walk, huge and graceful at the same time.

* * *

That evening, after the dinner hour, Sam Darkling came by. I had his documents spread over the dining room table. He had filed an extension April fifteenth, hoping to figure out a way to avoid forking out a big chunk of cash for taxes; now, on top of that, he had the interest and fees. He’d been working at it for months and was butting up against the deadline for the extension.
I’d gotten his call two weeks earlier. One of my clients recommended me, he wouldn’t say which since the client didn’t want it known in town he had dealings with Darkling – or so he said. He fussed and fudged his documents another week because he didn’t know how much he should reveal until he finally decided he better give me everything, let the chips fall where they may. At least that’s what he said, and there was no percentage in doubting him.
Darkling had a small bookstore specializing in the occult and self-healing, as well as a few web sites that pulled in a surprising amount. He had self-published several books that sold well on his sites. I ordered one as soon as I agreed to take his case, Dark Mythos, a compilation of dubious rituals, sacraments, and myths turned out in his hair-raising style, directed toward an audience seeking the kind of spiritual guidance requiring advice contrary to common sense and medical practice.
His motto on one site was, “If it’s not crazy, in a crazy world – how can it be sane?!” It had been hard for Sam to come to a tax specialist, but he was desperate. From what I could see, he had made a surprising $127,000 last year, even though he tried to diminish that amount every way imaginable, a few unimaginable. There were more legal ways to diminish the total, taking everything into consideration, but he would have to pay something he didn’t want to pay. Now he was paying me to tell him how much.
I hadn’t enjoyed looking through anyone’s papers as much for several years. The most sympathetic detail I gleaned from my perusal was that he had taken custody of a twelve-year-old autistic nephew, Maxwell Allen Darkling, when his brother Derek was incarcerated for a murder Sam argued was justified, if unwise. We had only talked on the phone when he came to drop off the pertinent documents. He filled the doorway with his frame and girth, in a yellow and brown plaid flannel shirt and blue work pants held up by a wide belt with an ornate buckle scored with arcane symbols the meaning of which I couldn’t guess.
His beard was a mixture of brown and gray across the lower half of a wide, pink face; he didn’t have a hair on top of his head, just a fringe of gray over his ears and the back of his neck, and his eyes were small, green, and sharp as glass. And yet, he had a delicacy of gesture almost girlish, and, to my delight, he brought his wife, a tall, slender woman in a flower print dress she must have made herself, a pile of red hair on top of her head, and a pair of the round wire-frame glasses I think of as granny glasses.
Here this man and woman had lived within a ten-mile radius of me, and I had never seen them in my wanderings. I invited them in and stuck my head out the door to see the old Chevy in the driveway with a boy inside, looking out.
“That’s Maxwell,” she said. “He’d prefer to stay in the car until he knows you better.”
“I hope he’ll come in when he’s ready,” I told her.
“Is it all right if Irma just curls up in that chair and reads while we hash things out?”
“Certainly, but can I bring you both a cup of coffee?”
“That would be nice,” she said. She slid in a chair, slipped her feet out of her clogs, and curled her legs beneath her. Her feet were red from cold, but she didn’t seem to notice. I wanted badly to know what she was reading but busied myself bringing coffee and then getting Darkling settled in the biggest chair at the table, which he smothered beneath his enormous body.
Charley, who has been a passive bystander to the greeting, lay down at my feet under the table with a groan. Darkling donned a pair of black-frame glasses and watched sullenly while I explained the tax forms I had penciled in. He had many questions, and when I had finished, he examined the forms carefully with his lower lip stuck out. His wife sat immobile, absorbed in her book, which I could now see was the sequel to one I had read, about coded messages in the scriptures. After perhaps ten minutes, he sighed with resignation, loud and long.
“Well, Mama, I guess this is about the best we’re going to do.”
He pulled out a worn checkbook and wrote a check for the amount and another for my fee. After he signed blank forms into which I would copy the final figures, I took out three beers and we sat in the living room until it got dark., The boy stood on the porch now, at the window, in a winter coat and hat and a pair of oversized mittens, rocking back and forth.
“He’ll let us know if he wants in,” said Darkling’s wife.
They finished the beer. Sam shook my hand, clearly relieved. Irma had already stepped outside and put her arm around the boy’s shoulder on their way to their car. I watched the family back into the street and drive away. However strange his appearance and career, Sam Darkling was not a very strange man. He had something he taught himself to do, did it, and it supported his family. I took pleasure in finishing forms and stuffing them into envelopes to go out the next day.
I put on a sweater and stood on the back porch while Charley laid his dinosaur egg, which I left for morning. I followed him to my bedroom, turned on the radio for quiet music, and read Dark Mythos until midnight, when I scratched Charleys’ head, turned out my light, and closed my eyes. I wasn’t so different from Sam, though I didn’t have a wife and a boy to care for.
Still, mine was a fortune cookie philosophy: Keep life orderly and everything will remain in sweet balance. Of course, as soon as you say or think such a thing, you admit the presence of disorder and imbalance. I have a rich dream life, though it always seems a bit odd we lie down, ceasing physical activity, and mental activity not only continues but blossoms, multiplying into areas about which our waking life knows very little.
I like dreaming but am often frightened by dreams in which I have mysteriously done something terrible or punishable in a court of law, though I don’t remember actually having done the awful thing, only the aftermath, when I am haunted by or pursued for it.
For example, I dreamt I killed someone – someone unspecified – chopped him or her into pieces and crammed the pieces in a cubbyhole behind a little trap door right inside my own side door. I did not recall having done this but when two plain-clothes detectives ring my doorbell, I knew exactly what they were after as I came down the stairs. I allowed a search – and how could I object? – with a sinking feeling of hideous guilt. I heard the younger of them say, in a normal voice from the kitchen, “Take a look at this.”
When I woke I still had the sinking feeling on my way downstairs that I had in my dream. I went right to the kitchen, to the side door, only to discover to my great relief that I have no such cubbyhole, no trap door. Relief washed over me in stages, like waves onto the shore. I stood in my kitchen reprieved but knowing the terror of having committed something horrible – all from a dream.
I am, I acknowledge, fascinated by such crimes and relish following developing stories in the papers, but I have absolutely no interest in partaking of this strange penchant for violence. I will one day go back and read about the murder for which Derek Darkling was sentenced to jail, but I repeat that I have no wish to be anything but an observer.
Perhaps this is why, the night I met Jane Carmen and had my session with Sam Darkling, I dreamed I was home watching television when I noticed the plain-clothes detectives examining my car. I went to the window. A newscaster was commenting on oil damage in the Gulf – I was confused about which Gulf – as I watched the older one get on his knees to peer under my car. I knew what they looked for: evidence of a hit-skip killing of a five-year-old boy on Market Street, in front of my favorite coffee shop – by the way, not where the original accident happened.
Again, I did not have an actual memory of the event, but I had an awful guilt for what happened, the blood of the boy on my hands and head. I felt sorrow for the boy – in the dream his name was Tommy – and for the mother who had suffered a loss the dimensions of which I could only guess. I woke in the dark, heart palpitating in panic mode. I had to stop myself from going outside to examine the undercarriage of my car. I got up, drank a glass of water, Charley at my hip, and stood leaning on the sink until I convinced myself that I had not killed Tommy Carmen, if that was his name.
As panic subsided it was replaced with a conviction that I must find the woman and speak to her as soon as possible. I checked the clock – 6:12 – and knew there would be no going back to bed. I let Charley out for a lengthy urination and cleaned up last night’s offering. I showered, dressed for Mass, put on a pot of coffee. As I stepped on the porch for the paper, Charley at my side, a chill indicated winter would in fact arrive on time. I sat at the table – scooting aside the Darkling documents – and read the paper before I left for church; I planned a private prayer for mother and boy.
I set my gray hat and the Darkling book on the passenger seat and drove to St. Hillary’s early, so I could sit in the sanctuary and watch it fill with an assortment of people of all ages and all manner of dress. Just before Mass began I saw Jane slip in the back, into a glassed-in section for parents with young children. Dressed as she had been yesterday, complete with trench coat, she repeatedly brought a tissue to her nose.
I certainly never expected to see her there, but I might not have noticed if she had come in previous weeks because she slipped out a few minutes before the end of the service. Since I sat at the end of the row, I felt comfortable sneaking out after her, head down, hat in hand. She was leaning into her odd walk down the sidewalk when I called her name. She did not hear the first time, so I raised my hat and came after her.
“Jane,” I called, “Jane Carmen.”
She stopped and looked around blindly, until her eyes fixed on mine.
“Frank Jones,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m here every Sunday morning. Didn’t I mention this yesterday?”
“I don’t remember. And I did not take you for a religious man.”
“This is it, every Sunday. It’s a habit I can’t shake.” I laughed, though she didn’t change her expression at all.
“Sometimes,” I told her, “I go to St. Barnard’s downtown for Spanish Mass at 6:00.”
“Do you speak Spanish?”
“A little bit,” I said, “a very little bit. But I like not understanding what I’m hearing.”
“Does that happen often?”
“Often enough,” I laughed again. “Listen, may I offer you a ride home.”
She stood watching me too closely, and a little angrily, I thought.
“Unless you have something else to do,” I said.
“No, I’ll take a ride with you, Mr. Jones.”
“I’m very pleased, Miss Carmen.”
I set my hat on my head, walked across the grass, and escorted her into the parking lot.
“I’m glad I ran into you,” I said as I opened the passenger door. “I’ve thought about our meeting yesterday.”
She looked up at me with that dead-eye look, and I shut the door. It was odd sliding behind the steering wheel with her in the passenger seat. I had not ridden with a woman in the passenger seat for a while. It disturbed me how much it moved me. Jane held Darkling’s book on her lap, staring out the window. Odd driving with my hat on, but where could I set it?
Anyone passing might have taken us for a married couple.
“What is this book?” she asked me.
“It was written by one of my clients.”
“What kind of clients do you have?”
“I prepare his taxes.”
“His name is Samuel Darkling?”
“Yes.”
She opened the book at the bookmark, a Darkling original, crawling with snakes and skulls. She read a chapter title. “God Creation,” she said. “What is that all about?”
“It is literally about how to make a god. Or, I should say, how they have been made by cultures throughout the world.”
“You mean pagan gods.”
“Yes, of course.”
“How do they do it?”
“Gods are made in various ways, evidently, some less physical than others.”
“Is he some kind of nut?”
“I would say so, but a very nice one. A little difficult to work with – believes taxes are unconstitutional.”
“One of those,” she said.
“He has something of a following. He puts out a magazine of the same title, circulation a little over eight thousand.”
She looked at the cover. “Dark Mythos,” she read.
I nodded as she flipped through a few pages.
“There is an African tribe in there – whether it exists in reality, I have no idea – that makes a god for every village. A village is an extended family group, and each village creates a god of their own to reside in some fetish object. In order to create a god they give it the name of a man or woman who has died, preferably at the hands of the villagers, and treat the fetish object in the blood and remains. He compares this with our Lord’s cross. One person is designated to care for the god and speak with him and be his messenger in the world.”
She told me how to get to her apartment, two streets from my house, and surprised me by the offer of a cup of coffee. The oddity of following her up the stairs to her door had its effect. I shook a little and my voice quavered when I told her I took milk in my coffee. I sat in a chair with my jacket on, my hat on my knee.
“Your apartment is nice,” I told her.
She kept it well, a few modest pieces in blue and green, a glass coffee table, a patterned oriental rug. She had a faux fireplace of white brick, common in old houses in this area, once an actual or gas fireplace. Sitting on the mantel was a simple copper urn that could only have been one thing – a repository for the ashes of her son.
When she came in carrying a tray with two white cups, still wearing the trench coat, she saw me looking away from the urn. She set the tray on the coffee table and sat on the other end of the couch. “Yes, that is Travis,” she said.
“His name was Travis,” I said.
She nodded. “I had him cremated so he would be portable. In case I ever move back to Houston, I can take him with me.”
“You grew up in Houston?”
She got up and went back to her bedroom. When she returned she was not wearing the trench coat. She had a nice shape in a white sweater and light green pants. She carried with her a plastic zipper bag the size of a small couch cushion.
“These are the clothes he was wearing. I haven’t washed them since the day.”
She sat beside me, unzipped the bag, and took from inside a small, long-sleeved white pullover with a dark stain on the front. She took out the little jeans, smoothing them across her knees, then socks and tennis shoes, and little blue underpants with a cartoon character on them.
“That’s Casper,” she said. “He liked Casper.”
I nodded.
“You see how small he was?”
“I do.”
I hadn’t noticed how warm it was in her apartment. We sat looking at the clothes while the coffee got cold. I began to perspire. When I finally took a sip, I spilled coffee in the saucer and set the cup on the coffee table. I told her I had another appointment with Darkling, which was a lie.
“He’s the man who wrote the book?”
“The same,” I said.
“I would like to meet him,” she said.
“Sometime you will, then.”
“I would like to read his book.”
“If you come to the car, I will let you have it. I am almost finished and can get another from him if I need it.”
“That would be nice.”
Then, I watched her refold her son’s clothes, stash them back in the plastic bag and zip it up. When she glanced at me, I realized I had covered my mouth with the fingers of one hand. I pretended to wipe something from my lips. I set my hat on my head while she took the package to her bedroom. She returned in the trench coat, and, without a word, I followed her down to my car, opened the door, and leaned in to retrieve the book, very aware of her right behind me.
“He would be delighted to know you are interested.”
She took the book from my hand, looked at the cover a moment, and then held it in front of her like a schoolgirl. I felt a need to say something, to acknowledge what had transpired, but couldn’t think of anything. I have since reflected that when I can’t think of something to say, I should just be silent. What I came up with made my ears burn. I asked if she still prayed God would allow her to die. It was her slight smile that died on her face.
I slid in behind the wheel to hide my embarrassment. I set my hat in the seat beside me and finally looked up at her. She watched me a moment, and then leaned down to the window and waited until I rolled it down. I could smell her sweet breath, feel warmth coming off of her. Her eyes looked brown and green at the same time, slightly luminous.
When she did not say anything or back away, I admit that a wild streak of hope pierced my heart and made the pulse of my throat throb. But the longer she looked in, the more her face frightened me, and I believe she could read the fear written on my face. She took her time, and then she said, her accent stronger than before, “This world is full of killers, I have learned.”
I watched her face, unable to keep my eyes from betraying my nervousness, looking from one to the other of her own. Then she stood up. “Mr. Jones,” she said, “I’m going to ask a favor of you now, and I hope you won’t be offended.”
I waited, unable to say a word until I realized she would not go on until I did.
“What is it?”
“Will you do this favor for me?”
“Yes, certainly,” I whispered. My mouth had gone dy.
“Next time you see me, don’t call out my name. Let me pass as if nothing ever came between us. Pretend none of this ever happened, if you can?”
I closed my eyes, nodded, and when I opened them, I watched her hair, her back, as she walked to her apartment and went inside. I was trembling when I pulled away.
I sat in the car in my driveway several minutes. I couldn’t think of anything to do, until I remembered Charley. He needed a walk. It was a beautiful day, fall sun everywhere, gorgeous turning leaves dancing about me, so that’s what we did.
Charley took an interest in sensory explorations; I was lost in my thoughts. On a circuit of a small triangular park that runs along Exchange, a broad-shouldered man with a wide walrus mustache leaped from behind a bush. I shouted, threw up my hands. Charley leaped up and set his paws on his chest, pushing him to the ground. When I helped him to stand up, I could see he was shaken, though Charley hadn’t made a sound and now looked on with only mild interest.
He showed me the sheet of paper that had become wrinkled in his hand, and the camera hanging around his neck. I signed that release once I understood what he wanted, just as shaken by the events of my day as the photographer. But he had my picture in his camera. While I went through my daily life as always, he had, I suppose, developed and submitted it to the contest, and it won. Now it’s on my refrigerator, all I have to do is look at it, to see what a foolish figure I cut that day, and every day of my life. And every so often, I have to remind myself I had nothing to do with the death of that child.

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Robert Pope is the author of the novel Jack’s Universe (Another Chicago Press, 1994) and the short story collection Private Acts (Another Chicago Press, 1990). His work has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review, The Kenyon Review, and The Pushcart Prize XIII: Best of the Small Presses.