Mr. Tall (9 page)

Despite the various privations that came with living in a drafty, fieldmouse-infested, hundred-and-fifty-year-old house with a terminally self-absorbed man, Rose grew to love the farm as she had never before loved a place. (When she was a child, her family had moved from Air Force base to Air Force base, and the only place she had loved was her bed, the dark safe tent of its covers, assembled and disassembled in a series of shabby, interchangeable bedrooms.) Afraid that Fieldin would make fun of her, she secretly began painting small watercolors of the garden and the orchard, the mountain always vigilant in the background. Eventually, she worked up enough courage to take a portfolio of her work to Three Weird Sisters, an art gallery in Argyle that was run by a trio of crewcut lesbians, transplanted from Milwaukee, whose specific domestic arrangement Rose could never figure out. Much to her surprise, not only did the gallery take her on as an artist but her paintings began to sell. Within a few years, they were selling as fast as she could paint them. Soon it seemed that every Florida Yankee who built a big house in the mountains had to have at least one painting by Rose Kohler. The only time Rose ever asked Fieldin what he thought of her art, he shrugged and told her that, while it didn't grab him by the balls, he liked it better than Andrew Wyeth's.

In the end, Fieldin quit painting altogether and took a part-time job in the gallery. He called the weird sisters his harem, and they called him their boy toy. At least once a week, either he threatened to quit over the crappy art they chose to display or they threatened to fire him for condescending to the customers. Whatever disappointment he must have felt at giving up painting, whatever resentment he harbored over Rose's success, he kept to himself, even after the state art museum in Raleigh bought two of her paintings for its permanent collection.

By the time they'd been married for twenty years, Fieldin had somehow become an old man. He spent the last five years of his life angrily wheeling a small tank of oxygen around the gallery, bitching about his emphysema and Abstract Expressionism. Rose was never able to persuade him to give up smoking, but he promised the sisters, under their threat of physical violence, that he would at least shut down the tank before he lit up. The slow process of dying never really softened Fieldin, the way it did people you saw in the movies, but it sanded down some of his rougher edges. Before he faded into unconsciousness that final night, he told Rose that she was the only thing he had ever loved that he hadn't over time come to hate.

Living alone for the first time in her life, Rose wasn't sure which puzzled her more, the creature she had seen in the orchard the night Fieldin died or Fieldin himself. She had learned from the letter he left on the bedside table that he wanted to be buried beside his parents, beneath a headstone bearing a Star of David. He'd never even told Rose that he was Jewish. About his history he'd said only that he was born in Vienna, to a long line of devout atheists; that when he was three years old his family had emigrated from there to Cleveland, where his father taught surgery at Case Western; and that his parents kicked him out of the house shortly after he had been kicked out of medical school. Fieldin's mother had still been alive and living in Florida when he and Rose married, but he'd never taken Rose to Palm Beach to meet her (although he went down for a week each February himself) and the old woman had never traveled to the mountains. When Fieldin's will was read Rose discovered that he had left her an investment portfolio—all blue-chip stocks and conservative mutual funds, worth just over $1.2 million—in addition to a small Renoir, which had belonged to his parents and was stored in a climate-controlled vault in Cleveland.

About her Bigfoot sighting, Rose learned that such creatures were routinely spotted in all of the southeastern states—although the orthodox scientific authorities of course denied their existence—and the animals were commonly referred to as skunk apes, because of the broad white or silver vertical stripe on their backs and their notoriously disagreeable odor. Southern skunk apes were generally known to be smaller, but meaner, than their Pacific Northwest counterparts. Rose gathered all this information from the Internet, from a Web site posted by a group calling itself the Cryptozoological Study Association (CSA), which was devoted to documenting the existence of heretofore undiscovered primates south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Studying these reports gave Rose something to think about besides Fieldin, at whom she unexpectedly found herself violently angry. Late at night—when she just wanted to
kill
Fieldin, and was stymied by the fact that he was already dead—she gratefully followed the CSA links to cryptozoological Web sites all over the world. (The Norwegian site had particularly stunning photographs of fjords, although she couldn't understand the text; the Albanian Web site had pictures of naked women smoking cigarettes.) When she gave the CSA a thousand dollars of Fieldin's money, she received an effusive thank-you letter, spattered with exclamation marks, naming her an honorary cryptozoologist.

Most days, she thought that the skunk ape she'd seen in the orchard had been a gentle being, sent by a benevolent god to lead Fieldin to the other side, but some days she couldn't help thinking that its mission had been more malign, perhaps even evil. Either way, it seemed obvious to her that, for whatever reason, that particular skunk ape, on that particular night, had come for Fieldin.

Southern cryptozoologists were divided between the small but harshly vocal faction who thought that in order to convincingly document the existence of an undiscovered species of primate a specimen would have to be killed and the larger but less combative contingent who insisted that the shy, gentle creatures must be protected at all costs. Rose weighed in on the debate by hastily e-mailing a somewhat—she realized later—histrionic letter to the editor of the
Argus,
the local paper, imploring area hunters to let the skunk apes of the North Carolina mountains live in peace. The only noticeable effect that her letter seemed to have on the community, however, was to lead carloads of drunken teenagers to pull into her yard at all hours, beat on their chests, and make monkey noises. She couldn't decide if the kid wearing a gorilla mask who peered in her kitchen window one night was made more frightening, or less, by his fluorescent-orange University of Tennessee sweatshirt. Despite the awful nature of Wayne Lee Cowan's crime—and Rose had never heard anybody, not even the other Cowans, suggest that Wayne Lee
hadn't
blown up that abortion clinic—she found herself feeling a little grateful to him for absorbing, with his continued conspicuous absence, much of the scrutiny and derision that might otherwise have been aimed at her.

Within days of Wayne Lee's disappearance, more than two hundred state and federal agents had descended on Argyle, followed by a caravan of TV trucks whose drivers thought nothing of taking up three parking spaces at once. The cops rented every motel room in a two-county area and made it virtually impossible to get a table at the Waffle House. An unusually quiet black helicopter circled the mountains day and night, and dangling on the end of a cable extended from its belly was some top-secret doodad of electronic equipment shaped like an upside-down mushroom. Because the sheer number of agents stomping or slinking through the woods made deer hunting a pointless exercise and growing marijuana even more hazardous than usual, and because a large percentage of the agents seemed to possess neither a baseline level of politeness nor a modicum of respect for personal property rights, the FBI soon lost favor with a significant portion of the local population—most of whose Scotch-Irish ancestors had moved to the mountains to escape some type of authority in the first place. Following the detention—by a SWAT team whose members wore ninja masks—of seven-year-old Brian Lee McInerny for aiming a laser pointer at the helicopter, stickers bearing the legend “Run, Wayne Lee, Run!” appeared on telephone poles and stop signs all over town. Not even the million-dollar reward the government offered for information leading to Cowan's arrest noticeably softened public sentiment.

But as time passed, and Wayne Lee Cowan remained at large, the television people and the majority of the cops left Argyle for what they probably considered civilization. Eventually even the remaining skeleton crew of FBI agents decamped as well. Interest in Wayne Lee didn't ratchet up again until the fifth anniversary of the bombing approached. Rose hadn't spoken to anyone in the FBI for over four years when she was visited by D'Abruzzio, the new Special Agent in Charge.

His first name was Richard, but shortly after his arrival he had made the mistake of telling one of the old guys in front of the barbershop to call him Dick. Now he went by D'Abruzzio only, or, when he was pissed off, Special Agent in Charge D'Abruzzio. Rose had noticed him in the Waffle House and found herself sneaking looks at him. He had the knobby biceps of a man who lifted weights for his health and not for his appearance, and he unself-consciously sported the type of virile, dark, vaguely ethnic mustache that most Southern men either wouldn't or couldn't grow.

Late one fall afternoon, D'Abruzzio materialized on her front porch, tapping gently at the screen door; he must have parked somewhere away from her house, an act she found both smart and considerate. They sat at the edge of the orchard, drinking hot spiced cider, while the air cooled around them and the hollows blackened as the shadows pushed the sunlight farther and farther up the side of the mountain. Rose told D'Abruzzio what she and Fieldin had told the other agent: that although Wayne Lee had worked for them, she couldn't honestly say that she knew him, or anything about him.

D'Abruzzio nodded and looked away. He seemed to be thinking about something else. “I read your letter,” he said.

Rose felt her cheeks go hot. “Oh, my,” she said. “Why on earth are you reading such old newspapers?”

“I like to know where I am,” D'Abruzzio said.

Good answer, Rose thought. “Do you think I'm crazy?” she asked.

D'Abruzzio pursed his lips and stared toward the mountain. “No,” he said finally. “I don't think so.”

“Do you believe in Bigfoot?”

“No comment,” he said.

“What's that thing that looks like a mushroom that hangs underneath the black helicopter?”

D'Abruzzio smiled at her. “What black helicopter?”

She blushed again. “You know what black helicopter. The one you brought back with you that doesn't make any noise.”

“Ah,” he said. “
That
black helicopter. Well, that thing hanging underneath it that looks like a mushroom? I can't tell you what that is.”

“I see,” Rose said. “A secret. But, hypothetically speaking, could such a thing be used to find a skunk ape? Or, if such a thing was looking for something else and accidentally found a skunk ape, would you be able to tell anybody?”

“I'll make a deal with you,” D'Abruzzio said. “I'll tell you if I see a skunk ape, if you tell me if you see Wayne Lee Cowan.”

Rose wondered where D'Abruzzio had parked his car, and if anyone had seen it. “Okay,” she said finally. “You've got a deal.”

D'Abruzzio stood up and stretched. “App Mountain,” he said. “Do you know where the name comes from?”

“I always assumed it was short for ‘Appalachian.'”

“I wonder,” D'Abruzzio said. “Maybe the guy who named it just didn't know how to spell ‘Ape.'”

Rose stopped at the foot of Plutina's driveway and stared sadly at her neighbor's house. It was tucked far back up the hollow on a knob its builder must have deemed too rocky to plant. A single light burned in the living room, and a thin gauze of wood smoke hung immobile above the kitchen chimney in the still, dusky air. Charlie had died two months earlier, and Rose knew from personal experience that Plutina was just now crossing over into what would be the darkest days of her widowhood. The officious stream of Sunday-school classes and bereavement committees bearing casseroles and Jell-O molds would begin to dry up, if it hadn't already, and the other visitors would return to their normal pattern of stopping by only when it suited them, if they came at all. Rose collected Plutina's mail from the box and started up the long driveway. Without Charlie and Plutina, she thought, the jagged wind that had swept down the mountain that first winter would have blown her God knows where.

Plutina opened the front door and blinked up at Rose through the screen. Her eyes, magnified as always by her glasses, looked even bigger, though everything else about her seemed to have grown smaller in the last two months.

“Well, Rose,” she said. “You might as well come on in.”

In the living room she perched in the middle of the couch, her feet barely brushing the floor, while Rose settled uncomfortably into Charlie's recliner. Its cloth upholstery reeked so strongly of cigars that it might as well have been haunted. Above Plutina, Fieldin's mournful Cherokee marched toward one of the mysterious pyramids he had dropped over and over again, without explanation, into Oklahoma.

“Did that FBI man go back to town?” Plutina asked.

Rose grinned. “How did you know he was over at my place?”

“He ain't as smart as he thinks he is, that's how. None of 'em are.”

“He wanted to know what I knew about Wayne Lee.”

“What'd you tell him?”

“I told him I didn't know anything.”

“Good,” Plutina said sharply. “That's the right answer.”

“I didn't
ask
him to come to my house,” Rose said.

“I know you didn't ask him, but he ain't doing you any favors by coming, either. You ought to tell him that.”

“I doubt anybody saw him.”

“
I
saw him, and I'm half blind.”

“Did he talk to you?”