Here, In This Place: An Origin Tale

ALEXANDER'S RIDE

CONTINUED

He read passages from On the Road when he wasn’t actually on the road, and became convinced Jack Kerouac was a whiny white man and a closeted homosexual. He talked to his mother every other night and in Denver, which Kerouac and Ginsberg had made him want to see, he shipped the motorcycle to Ohio, and then took Amtrak to Chicago to follow it.

It was the height of summer when he arrived in Chicago and it was too big and too busy, overwhelming and compelling from the moment he got off the train and came into Union Station. After days on the train, Sunny was overwhelmed and dizzy, and set to getting back his motorcycle. Riding was different here, more dangerous, and he told himself he would probably take a train or a bus and ride once he’d gotten to Ohio, but he liked the strange danger. He went to Lake Michigan and stood amazed, looking at an inland sea he had to convince himself was just a lake. He rode out of Chicago and into Indiana. He took the old highway, not the toll roads, and tried to figure out what he thought of the Midwest. That night he stayed in South Bend, Indiana and went to a bar. When he told someone he was just visiting and they asked him what he thought of the town, he said he didn’t really understand it, then Sunny had another drink and went to bed.

He didn’t think much of Indiana, and when he crossed the border into Ohio, he thought even less. He was surprised when he reached Lassador, for though it seemed to have taken forever to get there, all of its buildings and expressways popped up in an instant. If Indiana reminded Sunny of something unfinished, then the state of Ohio reminded him of something run down, and when the expressway lowered him onto the main streets of east downtown Lassador, he shuddered and thought of Gotham City in one of the Batman movies.

“Find a hotel and find it fucking quick,” he murmured to himself, and at an overpriced hotel overlooking the river, where dinner had long ceased to be served, he got a room and told himself to look for a motel tomorrow. But then tomorrow, he’d be searching through records about what had happened to Blake.

“Well, Mr. Kominsky,” James Karney said, “I honor the fact that you traveled all this way to learn about your friend.”

“A phone call would have done,” Tanya Sommers said.

“No,” Sunny looked up at her, annoyed, and no being annoyed by certain Black people did not make him a racist he told himself, “it wouldn’t.”

“You wanted to be where he was,” Captain Karney said.

“I don’t want him forgotten.”

“No, of course not. But the thing is, I’m not sure I would be the person best to tell you anything.”

“It was so much going on at the time,” Detective Sommers said. “And, truthfully, the way he died was strange.”

“Blood drained from him, throat crushed…”

Tanya Sommers looked disturbed. She looked to Captain Karney and he said, “Mr. Kominsky—”

“Sunny,” he said.

“Sunny,” Captain Karney agreed. “There is one person you could talk to about this. And I think it would do you both good.”

“Okay?”

“But would you mind making a trip about forty five minutes south of town?”

“Out of Lassador?”

“Yes.”

Sunny nodded. He couldn’t wait to get the fuck out of Lassador.

“Glencastle will do you good,” Sargeant Ross told David Lawry his first day back at work.

The truth was David Lawry had always felt fragile. As a kid he was thin and weak and when the teenage years approached he felt he’d been stretched out like a piece of gum. Mr Gerkin, who had been the wrestling coach, said that the thing about wrestling was anyone could do it, you’d be fitted to someone your size. And so Mark had joined wrestling. He joined soccer. He had even started boxing, and he had managed to forget his fear, nearly put away his self doubt. He wondered now if it was why he had become a cop.

He knew that one reason, the chief reason, was because he wanted to help people. He wanted to be the good guy. David had wanted to make a difference, and up until last year he had been the guy that found the parent with dementia who had been wandering around, who kept the neighborhood quiet when that one jerk made it a misery for everyone. He had been the person who, learning about a petty thief who had stolen money from a trusting friend, tracked that person down. People had a lot of ideas about cops. Some people still believed they were saviors. A lot of people were willing to think they were corrupt on a good day and flat out racists on another. It had gotten to a point where even other white people reacted poorly to him. David had seen corruption and racism. He’d seen true laziness. He’d seen truth swept under the rug and justice ignored, If he could call himself proud of this, one of the things he was proud of was what he didn’t report, knowing a kid in trouble, a man on a bad day, a woman caught at the wrong time, would have been on her way to jail or maybe to prison, and the system was bullshit. It really was. He still wondered what the difference was between doing your best and aiding and abetting something that was broken, maybe even evil.

But with all of that, he had made it from the age of twenty two till last year without killing anyone. It wasn’t a thing cops had to do. It wasn’t a given. Really, someone with no ambition could essentially spend their lives handing out parking tickets and in a nice quiet place like this, or back near Ann Arbor where he had been, you could rise to captain with your gun being as much of a symbol and as unused as a Masonic sword.

Killing someone had fucked him up. He had never believed that a gun would make him tough. He felt fragile, true, but he thought that protecting people as best he could was the way to forget about that fragility, or to use it. Pulling that trigger was the worst thing he’d ever done. Watching Gale Thornton die was, until then, the worst thing he’d ever seen.

And then everything after that became unbearable. That was when the strange murders had happened. That was when the strangest of all had happened. That was when the fragile exterior that had held together for thirty years cracked.

David had never been a reader, and he’d never had much imagination, but there was a kid in school who loved King Arthur, and once David had seen a lean man on a horse in silver armor with a red tunic or something over it. He’d even had sort of floppy dark hair, and he’d been kissing the hand of a lady.

“Who’s that?”

“That’s Sir Lancelot.”

David filed that away. In the back of his mind he had been Sir Lancelot. Dashing. He knew how to be dashing, impressive with the ladies who liked his boyish smile, his police badge and whatever a gun at your side hinted at. In those last days he had been fucking his next door neighbor and feeling like a man, seeing himself as she saw him, manly, a muscular strength in his wiry arms, a passionate lover, inexhaustible with a gleam in his eyes.

And then he had lost his mind and been reduced to a gibbering nutjob in a psych ward. He still felt like one. He was still ashamed. If he’d said these things about anyone else, it would be insensitivity, but it was the way he felt deep inside. When he’d come out, he had been too embarrassed to see Claire anymore. He’d shut himself off, and when he’d gotten the chance to transfer to Glencastle, David Lawry had jumped at it.

David had never been a person of whimsy, but Glencastle, with its broad streets, Victorian houses, ice cream shops and old style downtown seemed to lend itself to one whimsy. In an old store he had been surprised to see a poster of the very picture of Lancelot he’d see  as  teen, and he’d bought it and made it be the first decoration in his new apartment.

Life as a detective in Glencastle involved more paper work and more looking for lost cars and cats than Lassador ever had, and he told himself he felt guilty, but the truth was he felt good. Back in the city there were people chasing down real crime, but from what he remembered they were always chasing down, never solving, never finding in time. When he told himself he should stop taking it easy, stop this calm breathing, stop getting off of work at a decent time and driving home to the apartment complex with the swimming pool and his little one bedroom apartment, he remembered Cody. He remembered his funeral. He remembered pulling that trigger.

How could it be that only a forty five minute drive could take him from Lassador, the ugliest fucking city in the world, to the peace and quiet of Glencastle, where once he was called out to walk the length of Mr. Koester’s property because he’d seen something moving around, only to find that it was a family of penitent possums?

One night, feeling the need for whimsy, he went to the show by himself, ordered a large bucket of popcorn, and watched the new superhero movie. Back in Lassador, back in that house, he was always so lonely. He was always aware of who and what was missing there, of his lack of companions. Dom came to visit. In fact, Dom visited him more here in Glencastle than he ever had in Lassador. And here, his coworkers were friendly, and David felt light and friendly, or at least lighter and friendlier than he had before, and here he didn’t mind his own company. It was nice to do things alone.

The morning after he watched the superhero movie and the explosions and fights were still playing in his head, he walked into work, whistling, and shot the breeze with Grayson and Mikelski. He had his own office here, and this building was new. The old one had been turned into a youth center. The sun was absolutely bright that day, and he saw someone come into the police station, and he was talking at the front desk to Marissa, and then he was approaching, yes, approaching David. He was handsome, looked like the sun, or like a surfer even though his face was sober, and the bright young man who carried summer with him walked into the office and said:

“Detective David Lawry?”

“This is. What can I do you for?”

“I just came from Lassador. I was talking to Captain Dick Karney, and he said I might want to come down and see you.”

Instantly came that feeling like the need to go to the bathroom, that feeling as if, despite his sunny looks and the sunny day, this raven had brought darkness.

“I just got in from California,” he was continuing. “I was deployed—”

This guy was deployed.

“And when I got back they told me my friend Blake Wilson was dead. But no one knew much about it? And so I’m here to learn about his death, and Captain Karney and Detective Tierney think you can help me.”

“Uh…. Alright. And, you are…?”

“Sunny.”

Of course.

“Sunny Kominsky.”