Chapter Eleven
Germaine held its breath, if a whole town can hold its breath, for two weeks waiting for the results of the DNA test to find out if Rita Budreau and the bones from the Ochocos were related. The town buzzed from end to end when the news came down. Howard put out an early edition of the paper in order to put a lid on rumors. 
About the same time as the identity of the bones was confirmed to be that of Charles Sevigney LaFontaine, the FBI also revealed the cause of death. Charles was badly beaten, his skull fractured, and ribs broken. One of the ribs had a mark on it that might have been caused by a bullet passing by. They also said that there was evidence of a bullet wound and shrapnel marks on the bones of his right leg, but these had healed by the time he died. Rita told them she knew about the wounds. Uncle Charlie was a war hero. He had a purple heart.
Then we all waited for Sheriff Sweet to complete his investigation. Until we found out he wasn’t conducting an investigation.
Two months passed without a word from Sheriff Sweet. He took the information from the FBI, said thank you very much, this is a local matter. We all figured the FBI was too busy with Homeland Security issues over in Bend, looking for bombs in the lava caves and shadowing swans in Drake Park, to bother with an old murder. A murder so old it pre-dated Civil Rights Law. If hate crime law didn’t exist then it wasn’t a hate crime, not legally. The FBI let it slide into Sheriff Sweet’s hands without a murmur of protest.
Howard interviewed Rita Budreau and ran a story in The Truth about Charlie LaFontaine based on what she could remember of what her mother told her and other family stories. The way he had just disappeared made him bigger than life for the LaFontaines. Rita remembers that sooner or later at most every family gathering someone would bring up his name. Her grandma and aunts and uncles, all the older folks at weddings and funerals told stories about Charlie.
Charlie was Rita’s uncle on her mother’s side. The LaFontaines lived in Louisiana, in New Orleans. The family home is gone now. It was one of the ones torn down after the hurricane. There is nothing left. Rita remembers visiting her grandparents home. It was a big old shotgun house, narrow, tall and long, one room leading to the next without a hallway, just connecting doors.
Rita’s mother told her that Charlie was never without an instrument of some kind. He played piano and guitar and saxophone and “might have played the fiddle, or a dozen other instruments. Always music in that house when Charlie was there.” The war ended that. Charlie went away and no one expected to see him come home. But he did. He came home wounded. It took him a year to heal and then it seemed like just his body healed. Something in his soul was wounded, too, and he was restless. Her mother told her how her big brother would sit out on the back veranda with his sax blowing some bluesy tune she’d never heard before. “Making it up most likely.”
Charlie was a quiet boy growing up. He liked to walk on the levee by himself. It wasn’t that he was shy of people, he just preferred his own company. When he got up into his teenage years, he was a little more social. It was like in those early years he was trying to figure out the world for himself and once he’d done that he was ready to find out what everyone else was like. Rita’s mom said she didn’t know what he thought of the world, she was too young to think that way. Everyone who remembered Charlie said he liked people. Coming back from the war, though, he’d gone back inside himself.
Rita guessed what he saw over there put him off the world. People say he hardly spoke to anyone for that first year he was back. But once he’d made up his mind to go out adventuring, he started talking to folks again or at least listening to them. Rita’s mom didn’t find him too talkative, but he could sit and listen even to his little sister, barely in her teens.
What Rita remembers most about what her mother said about Uncle Charlie was not so much the things he did or said, but how much her mother loved her big brother and how she always believed something terrible happened to him. She was sure that he wouldn’t have stopped writing those postcards with the funny pictures he liked to draw on them of the people he met. Rita thinks the family contacted the state police up in Oregon, but nothing ever came of it.
He went through the Southwest first and then up through California. He sent a card from the Redwood Forest with pictures of those giant trees and the picture he drew on that one was of a big tree trunk with a tiny little figure at the bottom. He wrote “me” with an arrow pointing to the little person. Then he must have taken off across the state and drove up Highway 97 because next thing they knew they got a postcard from a little town in Central Oregon. He said he was stranded there for a few days. “On my way to Seattle. They’ve got music up there.” But he never made it to Seattle. As far as the family knew, he never left Germaine. Just about every week or two, he’d send them a letter or a postcard about how he was playing music and how sometimes he would go all the way up to the Columbia River to the train depot in a place called Pendleton and talk to the porters to hear them talking in the sound of home.
He wrote about a woman he met, but he never mentioned her name, just that she was different from anyone he’d ever known and had a voice that sent chills up and down his spine. He wrote a lot about the desert and the forest and seeing wild animals almost every day. Seeing deer and elk, coyotes in the early morning, rabbits, and sunsets that nearly broke his heart. He said nothing he’d ever seen anywhere was nearly as beautiful as the sun going down over the high desert. The last letter they got, he said he was coming home soon.
Howard put most of what Rita told him in the article he wrote.
I’m driving. The night is so dark. No, it’s not dark. I can see streaks of lights. I can see houses with lights. I can feel tears on my cheeks. I can see millions of stars, but the night is so dark. It’s hot in the car. The pale men are smoking. They don’t talk. I hear them thinking. They’re scared. What am I doing? What am I doing? He shouldn’t have touched her. Why’d he touch her? There’s a baby in the backseat crying. I stop the car and get in the back and take the baby in my arms and it won’t stop crying. I’m driving. The road is straight and long and it goes on forever.
Three men in a car with Charlie. That’s the thing I know about this dream. There were three men in the motel and three men in his car and he was driving into forever, into his death.
