Reservation Road by John Burnham Schwartz Page A

pulled the sheet off my naked body and lay there on the bed, imagining the tall, dark man sitting at a wooden table in some kitchen somewhere, reading the newspaper. His glasses were round and reflected light. I imagined him getting to the word “suspect” and not knowing what to do. Not knowing anything about me. Where my name should be he’d find just that word; and where my photograph should be he’d find nothing.
    I imagined knowing him and him knowing me. I imagined telling him the truth about myself, filling in the blank places.
    This suspect was thirty-eight years old. His body was of the burly, chunk-a-lunk variety—six feet tall, two hundred pounds. Big enough to hurt somebody. He’d played football in college (second-string tight end) until injuries knocked him out; there were operation scars on his right shoulder and left knee, and those joints ached in the cold weather. He’d broken his nose, too, or his old man had, long ago, and it had set wrong and there was a permanent bump there. It gave his face “character,” people always said. His eyes were green if they were anything, and he had a cleft in his chin as if a little piece of him had fallen out during birth. His hair was brown and straight, with the first signs of gray, and he wore it short, lawyerly, though by now it was generally known in the area that his best days as a lawyer were behind him.
    What else? He could remember an afternoon sitting in a graveyard with his back against the curved gray stone wall. The wall stones were large and round and they pressed against the bruises his old man had made earlier, and with the pain there was the smell of fresh-cut grass and turned soil. Then skip a few years and he could remember being big and strong for the first time, lifting weights in the gym at school and learning to hit the heavy bag and the speed bag. There was the smell of sweat and leather and the sound of his taped fists smacking against the bags, a different music from each, and the magic, rock-hard, lactic burning in his arms. He could remember people being afraid of him, and how his old man started looking like just another little man to him. He could not remember crying, ever.
    What else? We were getting close now, the tall, dark man and I, making our way through the history. This was important. I wanted to tell him that the newspapers didn’t give a shit about him. They wouldn’t listen. Listening was a lost art and they weren’t about to dust it off just for his sake. No, they’d tell him how it really was, who had been there on the dark road, what he and his family’d been through, the name of what they’d lost. The article would be maybe two inches long. It would be in a section like “Crime Watch” or “Accidents” or “Deaths,” or maybe it would even be on the front page. It would contain all the necessary names but one.
    He should throw the newspaper out. I wanted to tell him. He should take his wife’s hand. He should talk and be listened to. He should know the whole story.
    What else? Tell the truth now, don’t lie. There were the elements of a life, yes indeed, basic things, rock-paper-scissors things, and then there was what you did with them. In the end it was only what you did with them that mattered. This was important. (Somehow, though, the suspect had not learned this.) Was the tall, dark man listening? There was love and marriage and then one day the suspect had hit his wife. There was a child, his only son, and the suspect had hit his son, too. And there was the rest of life, there was trying to be a father and a decent man, and the suspect had driven his car into another man’s son and killed him and had not stopped.
    Outside, another car went by. Maybe it was seven by now, neighbors going to work. Maybe it was already hot out there. Somewhere the tall, dark man was drinking coffee and reading the newspaper. I could hear birds again, not doves but chickadees and blue jays. And something else, too. What I