A Walk in the Park

© 2004 James Owens
All rights reserved.

He guided the rented car into a slot beside the last picnic table along the park's entrance road. Ellis seemed to have the place to himself. There were no children playing on the grass, no workers from the nearby office buildings here for an early lunch break. In the playground, empty swings hung ready to cradle absent bottoms, and a raveled volleyball net swayed in a breeze above grass that looked as if it had been worn flat during the past weekend. It must be too hot, he thought, for anyone to be here in the middle of a flat Tuesday morning.

Ellis slowly released a long breath and left the car, locking the door behind him. He didn't think the interview had gone well, and now he had half a day to kill in a town he would probably never see again after his plane left at four.

He was pretty sure he had not gotten the job. Cathy would be disappointed, Ellis knew, and when he told her about it she would pause just long enough to make sure he had registered her disappointment, vague puzzlement wrinkling her forehead before she smiled deliberately and took his hand. She would tell him it was okay, he would surely land the next one, they would be fine on her salary alone for a while longer. But she would see to it that he knew she was making an effort to be kind; that it required an effort.

Would he really want to live in Midport, Mississippi, anyway? It was hot. Once out of the car's air conditioning, Ellis immediately felt beads of sweat popping up on his forehead. He removed the jacket and tie he had worn to the newspaper office, stowing them inside the car, then stretched and looked around. A walking path led off into the woods on the other side of the picnic table and a wooden, square-lettered sign read "Mississippi River .8 miles." It was shady under the trees, and he wondered if it would be cooler on the path.

A walk might relieve some of the frustrated tension that had built up in Ellis's back and shoulders as he tried to field questions from the three editors who had stared at him across the polished table like suspicious judges or mediaeval inquisitors while he stumbled through the reasons why he wanted to be a photographer for their paper. It wasn't a large paper, or even an especially good one; simply a job he needed badly.

Dirpen, the fat, bald managing editor with piercing, suspicious eyes, had seemed much less than impressed with Ellis's answers to some questions. And if they bothered to call his references, he was sunk. His resume hadn't mentioned that he had held seven jobs in the past four years, and a bit of checking up would reveal that he had actually been at one of the newspapers he listed under "former employment" for about half as long as he claimed, and that he had never worked at one of the others.

He sighed, shrugged, and set out toward the river. He found a sluggish breeze moving from the direction of the water. Dry brown pine needles covered the ground, less thickly on the asphalt path, and his footsteps were padded and silent. Small birds flitted from branch to branch and hopped behind trees just at the edges of his peripheral vision.

Five minutes later, he was so deeply absorbed in a meditation on what a jerk Dirpen had been—slapping Ellis on the back with a false don't-call-us-we'll-call-you grin—that he was a couple of steps away before he noticed the shabby, gray-haired man slumped between two pines. He stopped abruptly, almost stumbling, and automatically raised his right hand, half to catch his balance and half as the start of a greeting gesture that died away in midair. The man stood absolutely still and seemed to be looking at something over Ellis's shoulder. Ellis looked away, but he couldn't help noticing that the man's skin was almost as gray as his hair; that his tattered clothes seemed to have come out of some garbage bin.

"Hi, there," Ellis said, embarrassed. He felt a need to say something, having come this close.

The man did not speak or change the direction of his gaze, which was fixed intently, unblinking, as if he were watching something too gripping for mere passersby on the path to penetrate his attention. Ellis turned his head to see what the stranger was looking at, but there was nothing behind him but more pines and, still only half hidden behind the scaly trunks, his own car.

Move along, Ellis told himself. Whatever this guy's problem might be, it's none of my business. He started walking again, reflecting that vague, frazzled derelicts were an inescapable part of the landscape these days no matter where you went, and that most of them were harmless, previously ordinary people who had lost, for some reason, the sometimes brutal game everyone else called normal life. In fact, if he kept missing job prospects and if Cathy's understanding but calculated patience wore very much thinner, he might someday find himself standing around in cast-off clothes trying to ignore passing strangers. He started the thought as a joke, then realized it wasn't one.

A few more steps and he saw the second man, taller than the first, maybe not quite as shabby, standing farther back from the trail a few yards down; just as unmoving, just as focused on some vision in the middle distance that Ellis could not see. There was a fork in the path that led away from the second derelict, and Ellis suddenly didn't want to pass near him, though he was somehow certain that this man would ignore his presence just as absolutely as the first had. He took the fork, turning deeper into the trees.

Something cold seemed to shift through the hot air under the pines, there was a rustling behind him, and Ellis was sure one of the standing men had moved toward him. He turned, but both were still where they had been when he'd passed them, staring straight ahead as if neither had twitched a muscle in days or had any plans to do so. Ellis looked around to orient himself for an exit.

He could no longer see his car. The outside world had been swallowed by the ranks of tree trunks. Of course, it would have been easy to follow the path back the way he had come, but he didn't want to pass by the two men who were still standing there, now with their backs to him, as solidly motionless as the pines. He had the disturbing feeling that, if he came close again, one of them might at last turn to look at him, and he didn't want to be the object of one of those intent gazes. He went forward, hoping the trail would loop back to the parking lot.

The next one was a woman, standing stiffly to his right. She was fortyish, wearing a mud-splattered blue dress that once had been long but now was raggedly torn across at the knees. She wore one shoe, high-heeled with thin straps across the toes. A line of what might have been dried blood painted a smudge from the right corner of her mouth to her chin. Her right hand, dangling limply at her side, was dripping. At first Ellis was sure it must be blood, but it was only water, muddy drops gathering on the tips of her fingers and plunging with a just-audible plop to join the puddle beside her foot.

Ellis tried not to look at her as he hurried past.

There were about half a dozen others, men and women. Ellis ran, thudding along the needle-strewn path past the silent, statue-like figures, not really thinking at all, eager to get out of the pines and away, and he didn't even notice that he was running until he narrowly missed going over a vertical, ten-foot bank into the river. He caught himself on a sapling at the edge, loosening a rain of red dirt and pebbles to splash into the warm, slow water below, which had undermined the walking trail and caused a collapse. His breath was loud. Sweat stung his eyes and dripped from the end of his nose. He didn't want to look behind him, but when he did, there was nothing there except the trees and twenty paces of asphalt pathway looping back to the parking lot, where his car waited at the other end, the plane ticket away from town tucked under the driver's-side sun guard.

Randy Meyer perched his long, thin self on the edge of Ellis's desk like some disreputable bird of prey. In his three months at the paper, Ellis had not formed close relationships with any of his co-workers and secretly knew he never would. The nearest approach to a friendship had been with Meyer, a fellow photographer, though it had amounted only to casual banter in the newsroom and a couple of uncomfortable, taciturn excursions to the bar across the street after work. Ellis had been vaguely aware for the past half-hour that Meyer was making a circuit of the paper's eligible males, trying to find a date for his fiancée's best friend, who had apparently blown into town for the weekend and was wreaking havoc with Meyer's own romantic intentions by distracting his betrothed.

Now Ellis was ignoring Meyer and trying to write a caption for the photograph he had just uploaded, an abstract composition of twisted metal that had once been two teenagers' automobiles in a drag race on one of the lonely, ruler-straight highways just outside of town. Ellis had managed, to Dirpen's vocal annoyance, not to include any of the drivers' scattered body parts in the picture.

"...and it's true, I swear, this girl is all that and more. You're perfect for each other," Meyer said in his best sales-pitch voice and paused hopefully. He didn't mention that this particular girl, according to him, was perfect for just about anybody in sight.

"You're crazy, Randy," Ellis said.

"What's that got to do with it? You need to get out and live a little, and you just might really like Cheryl. Besides, what else are you doing Friday night? Watching reruns and washing your underwear?"

"Something like that." Ellis had never cared for other people telling him what he needed. "Whatever it is, I'll be doing it with my wife."

"Wife?" Meyer stared at him.

"For seven years, in July. I don't think she'd approve of my dating." Ellis was sure, almost, that he had mentioned Cathy to Meyer before. Many times, probably. The jerk was simply too self-absorbed to remember anything that happened more than two inches past his own nose—or other relevant appendage.

"Well, hell," Meyer said, momentarily at a loss, something Ellis had not seen before. "Bring her along, then. I'm telling you, this girl is friendly...."

"Bug off, I'm busy," Ellis grumbled what he hoped was a good-natured dismissal as he turned back to his keyboard. He stared blankly at the screen for a full minute before he started typing.

Ellis drove across the bridge at twilight. This drive was one of his favorite things about living in Midport, and he sometimes lingered at work so that he would hit the bridge at the right time. The sunset was gorgeous, vast piles of orange and silver-edged and blood-crimson clouds, as if the world were burning down just west of town and he were flying into the center of the conflagration. The river was wide here, and the bridge arched up long and high above the water already black in shade between its steep banks. A few houses crouched on the bluffs, some with their back rooms on stilts, hesitating on the edge before plunging into the darkness.

Ellis figured he would never truly be at home in the South. Sometimes, driving through the too-green, too-fertile countryside in search of some twangy farmer the paper had sent him to photograph, he felt a perverse twinge of nostalgia for the meanest, grimiest streets of Chicago's Southside. But he loved the view from the bridge without reservation, a few moments at the end of each workday that were available for pure contemplation, free from the frustrations of a job where he wasn't really happy and the other frustrations of a marriage that he lacked the nerve to admit was stalling for obscure reasons.

Ellis was seldom able to turn the key in the door of the apartment they had leased without reminding himself that they could afford such a place only because Cathy was earning more than twice his salary, and the reminder was invariably accompanied by a little stab of annoyance that he was still dwelling on the fact. He had been surprised to learn that the brokerage firm she worked for in Chicago operated a branch office in Midport. Her employers had transferred her with minimal fuss and, in fact, a substantial raise, though she had already been obliged to make several trips back to the home base for conferences with her superiors.

They lived in a grassy subdivision with a security gate and a belligerent-looking guard blocking the entrance, though Ellis wasn't sure what they were being guarded from in the quiet little city. There were two stacks of overpriced apartments flanking the road just inside the gates, and Ellis and Cathy were on the top floor of the one on the left, but farther on, past a shrub-crested knoll that blocked the view, were rows of opulent houses, two and three stories, with multi-car garages and vast lawns that were regularly planed to a millimeter's precision. Cathy wanted one of those and expected to get it, either in Midport or somewhere else. Sometimes, as they were coming home from shopping or a movie, she told Ellis to drive past the big houses before doubling back around to their own place.

When he came in, Cathy was sitting at the kitchen table, her briefcase and laptop computer open in front of her and papers scattered around. She nearly always brought work home with her, and she preferred to work in the kitchen, rather than at the desk in their bedroom, because the television was also in the bedroom and Ellis liked to pile up on the bed after dinner and flip channels.

She waved distractedly but didn't lift her head from checking a list of figures on a page in her hand against a list of figures on the computer screen.

Ellis was sure, though he had never mentioned it and probably never would, that she was having an affair with the man who had secured the new job for her. When the time came to choose, she would not choose Ellis.

Behind her, he bent from the waist and kissed the back of her neck.

"Um," she said, "don't break my concentration."

Ellis wandered off and changed clothes. He hated the requirement that everyone at the paper, photographers included, show up every day in a jacket and tie. The dress code was a guarantee that he would feel trickles of sweat starting under his collar the moment he left the air-conditioned office on any assignment in the Mississippi weather. Just walking from the office to the parking lot at noon was enough to get him drenched.

Cathy continued working while Ellis fumbled around the kitchen, doing his best to concoct an approximation to kung bao shrimp, which he knew she would eat without much comment, in a hurry to get back to her analysis of stock performances, or whatever she was doing that night. Once, he knocked over a bottle of soy sauce, and a stream of the brown liquid snaked toward a folder she had just opened on the table. Lifting the folder, she growled, "We really have to get a bigger place."

As he cooked, Ellis told her disconnected bits of his day. He wasn't sure she was listening, but he left out the part about Randy Meyer and the blind date he had refused.

Just as he was arranging the food, which looked pretty good after all, the telephone rang.

Suicides are usually off-limits to journalists. The theory is, if you want to kill yourself, that isn't any of the public's business, as long as you aren't determined to take anybody else along. Of course, the rule doesn't apply if you happen to be a public figure, or if you choose to die in a public place.

The city park beside the river was a public place. Nevertheless, Ellis had resisted when Dirpen called and ordered him to get down there for a picture. Maybe he was still scared of the place, which he had been careful not to think of since arriving back in Chicago and finding a job offer waiting on his answering machine. And he had not gone there again. Sometimes he woke at 3 a.m. from nightmares he could not remember, but which had the same tone and timbre as that first and only visit.

"Get a picture," the ME gruffed, and he sighed loudly to show how irritating it was, having to explain things to the new guy. "We decided last time that if there were any more floaters there we were running full stories. And try to get a little drama into this one."

Dirpen hung up. Ellis knew what "drama" meant. Scattered body parts. Still twitching, if available.

Now he was standing in the dark while a cop, doing his best to remain stoic and precise, spoke to two reporters, one of whom Ellis recognized as being from his own paper, though he didn't know the name.

"We don't have an identity yet, but she looks about twenty. Blonde, red T-shirt, jeans. And barefoot; she must have taken her shoes off before going in the water. It's odd, they're usually barefoot, like it's an old habit, you take off your shoes when you're going swimming.... This damn place has to be the suicide capital of the state. Every couple of months...."

The cop was rambling, Ellis thought, talking to head off some interior trouble that had threatened his professional calm. Ellis wandered away, back toward the corpse, attracted without wanting to be. He had already gotten the picture, a low-angle shot of the body mounded under a blanket, no detail except a tuft of pale hair draggling from the back of the young woman's head. The pines around her would show in the flash like a half-circle of haggard witnesses. If Dirpen didn't like it, he could shove it.

Ellis could have gotten a shot of the face, even a close-up, if he had wanted. He lifted a corner of the sheet to see her, and no one tried to stop him. There was no clue on the riverbank to suggest why she had decided to die, what loneliness and grief she had carried with her into the black, dirty water, but Ellis felt sure she wouldn't want newspaper readers staring at her. Maybe it was a meaningless gesture, protecting her last shred of privacy, but wasn't suicide the ultimate plea to be left alone?

Soon they would be loading her into the ambulance. Ellis looked at her face again in the revolving emergency lights. He couldn't guess what she had been like, as if the water had washed all character from her face, leaving it a doll's mask. She looked peaceful, the oldest, tritest cliche anyone could apply to the dead. But true. Night-flying insects whined from every direction, as loud as sirens. A puddle of river water in her slack mouth glowed red, over and over, as the ambulance lights flicked across it.

Ellis uploaded the picture of the dead girl from his camera into the computer reserved for photographers' use in one corner of the newsroom. It looked pretty good; maybe a little tweak here and there. As he was cropping the photo for more emphasis on the sheeted body, he saw the points of red light floating in the trees behind her.

Reflections? Off what? Ellis didn't remember anything among the trees that could have picked up his flash like that. He looked closer, and there were faint, dark outlines surrounding the lights.

He worked on the image, cranking up the brightness and contrast until the dead girl had faded into a hovering white blur, and the other outlines wavered and solidified, came clear enough. The bits of reflection were eyes, throwing back his flash from their depths like the eyes of animals circling a campfire. But the outlines around the eyes were not those of animals. He guessed that the statue-like forms he had met on his first trip to the park were among these, but there were many more now, dozens crowding out of sight, back through the trees.

"What's that?"

The question, coming from behind him, startled Ellis, and Randy Meyer laughed when he jumped in the chair.

"What's that?" Meyer repeated. "The floater? Pretty damned washed out, isn't she? Ha! Get it—washed out?"

Ellis felt blood draining from his face.

"That's her," he said. Then, "Look close. See anything?"

Meyer leaned into the screen, and his mingled smell of sweat and cologne coiled in Ellis's stomach.

"This is her, right?" Meyer traced her form with his index finger.

"Anything more? Around her?"

"Um, trees, an ambulance wheel. What else?"

"Nothing," Ellis said. He wanted Meyer to go away, and he tried to repeat "Nothing, nothing there," but his words were cut off when his face hit the computer's keyboard and he rolled out of his chair to the floor. He could barely hear Meyer shouting "Goddamn!" as the darkness lifted up a cold hand and pulled him under.

Ellis sat in his car, staring into the trees. He rolled the window down and let the midnight breeze blow through, searching his hair. The night smell of Mississippi was different than anywhere else he had ever known, an oddly pleasing mixture of rotting flowers and stagnant, dusty heat. Some nights it seemed he could detect a salty undertone blowing up from the Gulf of Mexico two hundred miles south.

There was nothing in front of him but ratty pines and empty asphalt walkways, unused at midnight. Somewhere out of sight, the big river slid by, gnawing at its banks.

"Nothing to see here," Ellis said, his mouth filling again with the coppery taste of the split lip he had gotten when he fainted.

He was lying to himself, he knew. The cops and paramedics had left hours ago. The young woman, whose name he would learn after her parents or boyfriend had called the police looking for her, lay in a cold drawer somewhere. But that didn't mean the park was empty. It was never empty, he knew.

He did not get out of the car, did not walk into the trees. Some minutes earlier, driving here, he had thought he might—but no. He would go home, let himself into the dark apartment, and lie beside his wife until morning. He would not tremble. And, some night soon, he would bring Cathy to the park for a stroll in the moonlight, and they would go together down to the river. Even if she didn't want to.

He started the engine and put the car into reverse. One more glance, and still nothing there. The still figures that seemed to be standing just out of the range of the headlights might not really be there, at all.

"Not yet," he whispered to whatever was waiting, as he drove away. "But not long, either."

Back to top of page