Free Forgetfulness by Ward Just Page B

smugglers, drugs or whatever. Not weapons, because of the weight. Maybe they were only illegals moving from one place to another. Why did they abandon her? Attempt a coup de grâce? Because they thought she could identify them. That's one logical motive. But maybe it was for another reason altogether, something we haven't thought of or even imagined.
    If only—
    I'd forget the if onlys, Thomas, Bernhard said. If only this, if only that. Dead end there. Blind alley.
    Fuck you, Bernhard.
    That's enough, Bernhard, Russ said.
    We did what we could and it wasn't enough, Bernhard said softly. We don't live in an ideal world, he added, his voice rising. He looked up when he heard a horn in the driveway. The cab had arrived.
    Not an ideal world, Bernhard? And all this time I thought it was.
    Then you were mistaken, Bernhard said evenly.
    Thomas opened the door to a landscape flooded with yellow light from the dying sun. He had spoken more sharply than he intended but Bernhard's mordant certainties had struck a nerve. Often Bernhard lost himself among the inflections of his many languages, caustic as a Frenchman one moment, sly as a Levantine the next, while remaining the sharp-eyed baker's son from LaBarre, Wisconsin, determined to get ahead in the wider world where the odds were assuredly—the assurance coming from his immigrant father, who kept a handbook on the side—not in your favor. When something was lost you accepted the loss and set your face. Whatever responsibility you bore was only an inconvenient detail in the larger scheme of things: getting even. Bernhard was mistrustful by nature and therefore a natural investigator who always went, as he said, the last inch. LaBarre's decline had made him a firsthand witness to the obvious truth that everything collapsed eventually and that the world was inherently unstable, so you disciplined yourself or someone else would do it for you. They were all midwestern boys, no matter where they were living or what language was in the street. They had taken different lessons from LaBarre, Russ the milkman's son and Thomas the son of a doctor. His mother was the doctor's nurse, medicine the family business. The consulting room was in an annex off the front parlor and when Bernhard and Russ went home with Thomas after school the parlor was always crowded with patients, people stirring awkwardly or coughing while they turned pages of the
Saturday Evening Post
or
Reader's Digest.
Often there was one patient who did not bother with a magazine but sat stoically staring into the middle distance. Russ wanted to rush through the parlor but Bernhard always paused for a long look at the patients before climbing the stairs to Thomas's bedroom to listen to the afternoon radio programs,
Terry and the Pirates
and the others. When Thomas warned him that they weren't to bother the people in the waiting
room, Bernhard replied that he wasn't bothering them, he was only looking at them. What was the harm in looking? Sometimes you could tell a lot by looking and remembering what you saw. Bernhard said you could tell which ones were in pain and not long for the world by studying their faces, where their eyes fell and what they did with their hands, and he mentioned the woman staring blankly into the middle distance as the case in point. Leave them alone, they don't want to be bothered, Thomas said. The woman's thinking about what she's going to tell her family, Bernhard said. But I'm only looking. And besides, they never see me, as if by that assertion he had made himself invisible. Bernhard was old beyond his years and had an answer for everything.
    The cab's here, Thomas said.
    We have to move along, Russ said.
    I'll call very soon, Bernhard said. When I have news.
    Thomas opened the door.
    I know how painful it is, Bernhard said. But you have to get to the bottom of it. That's the first thing. And I'm going to start turning over rocks, every rock I can find. Whoever did this will not succeed.