The Interloper Read Free

the years, of course, everyone would grow older but him.
    Calvin Senior held up the picture, CJ on the beach with his surfboard, and said to me, as if to explain his thoughts in that moment of silence: “The guy who did this is in jail. When I think of what he did to my son, I think that prison rape is not such a bad thing.” He put the picture back. “I’d kill him with my barehands if I got the chance. But I won’t get the chance. I don’t want the chance, usually.”
    The door to the kitchen clunked and swung open—my wife and her mother, holding desserts. Calvin Senior looked at me and shook his head almost imperceptibly. I understood. Not a word to anyone, the dissenting opinion is sealed up in its envelope, now try to pretend we were talking about something else. But they would go on talking about CJ, Patty would go on wearing black, Calvin Senior would go on steaming quietly, grumbling inside … the body decays, the memories jumble, the stories evolve, the photographs fade. We’re all hobbled together. Odds and ends. Bric-a-brac. CJ is: a buried body, Stocking talk, newspapers, videos and pictures, Raven’s account, a diary. I can’t put him back together. I can’t put myself back together. The pieces are me but not mine.

2
    A month prior to that dinner at the Stockings, I had written to Henry Joseph Raven, using the pseudonym John Dark. This was the failure from the ashes of which my new plan would grow.
    I remember that first encounter with Raven the way one remembers meeting one’s sweetheart, with fondness, and with a desire to go back and do it all over again. It was one of those unusually warm nights in Our Little Hamlet by the Sea; the temperature seemed to rise after the sun had gone down, and a fecund breeze perfumed the air. This, after an unremarkable muggy day. Patty was off at work; I had the house to myself. I’d discovered that the state maintained a complete database of prison inmates, accessible to anyone with an internet connection, and I had logged on to it. The house was quiet save the cats tumbling in the other room.
    I clicked through some of the other captured convicts before I got to Raven—I knew he would be there and the anticipation was something I felt like drawing out. I saw men and women,White, Black, Latino, Asian, all of them looking poor and poorly rested, defeated—though a few tried on a mask of defiance. Their crimes were listed along with their names and some other information, but the names of the crimes,
murder, manslaughter, assault with a deadly weapon
, provided little detail of their stories. You could stare at a picture long enough and imagine that plump, rosy-faced woman holding a gun under the counter and asking for all the money in the register, but since her story wasn’t there, you couldn’t be sure that was how it had happened. You were stuck with
armed robbery
. Shown a few in isolation, you might guess these individuals were victims of human rights violations, women who had just given birth, or men in drug rehab centers. But en masse they were malefactors.
    He was waiting for me by the time I got down to the Rs, and he did not disappoint. He had the appearance of a murderer. Not all the murderers did. You could see in the way his eyes glared at the camera that he had no respect for human life. He looked hungry and tired, like he had been dragged out of bed moments before the picture was taken—it made sense, he had been on the lam for a week before they tracked him down. His eye sockets looked like they’d had billiard balls pushed into them. He had the stubbly, slack-jawed mien of a criminal who has finally been caught.
    I swept aside my papers and cleared a space on my desk. I wrote several letters, each more cruel than the last, in an attempt to express my rage at the man responsible for CJ’s death, for ruining our lives, for replacing my wife with a grim shadow of her former self. After I’d torn up six drafts, I realized that a piece of