Possession (10 page)

Six hours later, the truck ran out of gas. He was in Natchitat at two in the morning, the only creature alive in the clogged street, except for the cat. He had to piss.

He set Pistol down in the snow to relieve itself, and the cat looked at him outraged. Sam watched his urine make a yellow line in the snowbank behind the truck, and then saw that the cat was peeing too. He tucked Pistol under his parka and set out on foot to find a motel, startled to hear the throaty purr begin against his chest.

They survived the rest of the winter locked into self-imposed solitary confinement in the twenty-seven-foot trailer Sam bought from a widower headed for San Diego. Sam drank, and Pistol ate, and they watched the snow melt and the apple trees bud out and blossom.

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At some point, Sam realized that he had to decide whether to live or die. A thousand times, he thought he would call her, but he never picked up the phone, and it never rang. By May, it had a thick mantle of dust, and Sam knew that he was going to live.

The Natchitat County Sheriff's Office welcomed him, and few questions were asked. His record was clean, he waived medical coverage because of his age, and his former Seattle police associates were generous in their reference letters. He fit into the department as easily as he slid his service revolver into his shoulder holster. He took Danny Lindstrom as his partner.

Off duty, Sam and Danny walked away from the office into the first light of dawn. It would be hot later, but it was cool now and the sky just above the mountains' ridges was the color of peaches and plums. They stopped silently to acknowledge the day before getting into Danny's pickup.

The town was still asleep; the guys who'd just come on watch could coast for a couple of hours. Sam leaned back and enjoyed the ride past the closed stores on Main Street, and then the neat streets lined with single-family residences, their yards square patches of green bordered with petunias and zinnias kept luxuriant by careful watering in this parched season. The citizens inside seemed safe from harm at this time of day, safe and loved and happy. He closed his eyes and let his head rest on the seat behind him, the leather cool and lightly damp from the night in the parking lot behind the jail.

Danny glanced over at him. "Tired?"

"Yeah. It's hell when you get old."

Danny laughed and pushed the gas pedal toward the floor as they neared the town limits and started up the hill where the orchards began, trees pregnant now with fruit, their branches supported by props, endless rows of them.

"You coming over for supper?"

"That would make three nights already this week. I think Joanne's getting tired of the sight of me."

"Never happen. She likes you."

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"She likes all stray animals. She's a natural-born patsy for the homeless and forsaken."

"Do it for me then," Danny said. "She's in a better mood when you're there. She's antsy lately. We fight. We never used to fight. She's bored, I guess. She hates me working graveyard. And she's still not pregnant."

"Seems like you could fix that," Sam offered finally.

"Seems like I can't. What if it's my fault?"

"So what if it is? It's not like you can't get it up. It shouldn't matter whose fault it is. I hear it can be fixed."

"It matters to me," Danny said. "It matters a hell of a lot, and I don't want to find out if it's me."

Sam shifted in embarrassment; the functioning of female organs was not an area where he had any expertise or any particular interest. The vast majority of the women he'd known had been more concerned with staying un-pregnant than in conceiving.

Danny and Joanne were a happy family unit, not young enough to be his children—but almost. Their farm was a place to go when Pistol's company failed to fill the void he still lived in off duty. His partner's marriage was something to take quiet comfort in, however vicariously. There was no envy in his soul over Joanne; he found her delightful, winsomely pretty, the matured image of the cheerleaders he'd yearned for in high school. She was a nice little woman.

Danny. Danny he would kill for. Danny was his partner.

"She still running?" he asked.

"Who? Oh ... Joanne? Yeah, she's out there running her little buns off."

"You should go with her. Get rid of that tummy."

Danny sat up straighter as he turned into the trailer park, sucking in the suggestion of fat at his waist.

"She doesn't want me to. It's her thing, and running five miles is the last thing I feel like after supper."

Sam crawled out of the truck cab and stood with his elbows leaning on the open window. "Take her on a vacation," he suggested.

"Got no time."

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"You got time. Take her on a vacation, spend about three days in bed together, with no pressure. Make a baby."

Danny laughed, shifted into low, and pulled away with a wave of his hand. Sam watched the truck until it was out of sight, caught in a cloud of road dust. Then he turned and walked through the sleeping park, feeling rather than seeing Pistol's soft body against his shins.

The trailer was cool and smelled of full ashtrays; his daveno bed was rumpled from the morning before, and three days' newspapers covered the floor beside it. He caught a whiff of gas from the leaking pilot light on the chipped green stove and cracked the windows in the living room of his metal box. Pistol made hungry sounds; Sam reached automatically for a can from the stack of tins on the counter and ladled out the fishy substance. He leaned against the wall and watched the old cat eat, feeling a twinge of arthritic pain in his left hip.

Sam grabbed a can of beer for his own breakfast. Pistol leapt onto the daveno, tired from his tomcat prowls in the night, ready to sleep the day away with him. He drained the can, crumpled it, and reached for another, watching the park outside come awake. Then he eased his body into the couch and fell into an almost dreamless sleep.

The entrance to the lane leading up to the Lindstroms' farmhouse was placed so exactly between the orchard rows and was so overgrown with weeds that as many times as Danny approached it he had to look carefully to spot it. He liked it that way; the spread looked like only an orchard and not a homestead. He'd deliberately mounted the mailbox a hundred feet beyond the turn-in, just as he'd vetoed Joanne's suggestion that they name the farm and put up a carved sign and arrow where the rutted lane began. He had

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to leave her there alone so often, and he felt easier knowing that the squat shake buildings were invisible from the county road. Townspeople knew they lived back there, just below the far rise in the lane, but strangers driving by couldn't glimpse even the peak of the roofline.

His truck jounced through the last wisps of ground fog, brushing against the dew-laden heads of wild wheat that leaned over the lane, and Danny smelled the sweetness of a recently mowed alfalfa field nearby. It was his favorite time of the day, coming home to Joanne, knowing she slept soundly in the old house. He listened for the hoarse welcome from his old dog, Frank, and then felt a keen pang of loss. Jeez. He was tired, and out of it. Frank wouldn't be waiting near the shed; he was buried out in back of the barn and had been for almost a year. He still missed the old Lab, especially in the early morning like this. He knew he had to bring himself to get a pup, but it was hard. Frank had been with him for half of his life, and you didn't find many dogs like that one. He'd found Frank, left behind when the migrant families moved on, when he was fourteen and Frank a pup barely able to walk. They'd looked each other in the eye and known they had the right combination. That dog had seen him through an awful lot of pain. Danny sighed, and thought of Sam's frowzy old tomcat who seemed more like a pain in the ass than a companion, but there was no accounting for taste.

The pickup hurtled over the rise in the rutted road and Danny saw the house was still there, safe and drowzy, its window-eyes closed with drapes. Joanne had left the back porch light on as always, just as his mother had when he was in high school.

He'd been itchy to get away from Joanne last night, free from her anger and depression, but it didn't seem important now. He only wanted to be with her again and hold her against him for the few hours they had to share in bed. It was no wonder they argued; they hardly ever saw each other, with his graveyard watch, and then sleeping all day. All they really had was suppertime, and he wanted those few hours to be peaceful and happy instead of a continuation

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of her harangue about babies, and sperm counts, and whatever the hell else Doc had been filling her head with.

Danny eased the truck into the shed, and walked stiff-legged toward the house. He tensed, alert, at the approach of the creature who waddled with wings spread warningly, from behind the sagging grape arbor. It was Billy Carter, a better watchdog than Frank had ever been. B.C. recognized Danny in mid-hiss, and lowered his wings, locking step with Danny. B.C. was Joanne's and only suffered Danny's presence grudgingly. Danny suspected that the goose didn't really sleep at night when he was on duty and was probably relieved to have him take over. The big man and the strutting fowl passed Joanne's kitchen garden, a blighted effort where only zucchini thrived.

"She's got a brown thumb, B.C.," Danny said compan-iably, and then laughed when the goose darted a look of what passed for disapproval at him. "Maybe you can survive on zucchini and sunflowers and worms, but she ain't no earth-mother."

The sunflowers were Joanne's triumph. Twelve-foot stalks with flowers as big as dinner plates edged the entire rear wall of the house and dwarfed the straggly petunias beneath them.

Danny paused as he always did to gaze across the now sere winter wheat field behind the house, and then to the gorge beyond where the river cut through the rocky canyon. The river was running shallow; he had to stop breathing to hear it now, but in a few months it would be filled with glacier run-off and snow from the Cascades and it would roar again. Even in Natchitat where life moved along so languidly that changes were almost imperceptible, things did change. But not the river, nor the farmhouse where he was born. His father's going off to Korea had hardly touched him; he had his grandfather, his grandmother, and Anna, his mother. He'd only been two years old and his memory scarcely formed. When his father didn't come home, his own life went on unchanged. His mother had cried, but Danny had wept only because her tears frightened him. Like all chil-71

dren, he assumed that his life was blessed, that the tragedies that consumed others would not come to him. And then both his grandparents had died within a week.

Doss Crowder was fire chief then, and father to the frail; little girl that Joanne had been. Doss was over at the farm a lot, helping Anna sell off some of the acreage she could no longer manage, somehow taking his granddad's place for Danny, and Danny couldn't remember if Joanne came because Doss was there or if it was the other way around. She was a pest, following Danny around like a shadow, asking stupid questions and getting in his way. It was years before he saw her as a young woman so pretty and soft that he ached to touch her, and quaked at the thought of Doss's wrath if he did. But by then, Joanne was so popular that he had to stand in line to date her.

God, he had been so jealous and so filled with frustration, secure only in athletics. Watching the river had comforted him during those years—until the day an aneurysm lying dormant in his mother's brain had burst and flooded that vital tissue with a sea of killing blood. She was dead before he could get there. She was forty-six years old and Danny was seventeen, and there was no one who could assuage his grief. He'd hated the river for continuing to flow, and the apple trees for daring to blossom that spring.

He refused to leave the farm, and he and Frank batched it while he finished high school. Joanne was the only one who could break through the anger that consumed him, and she'd given up going to college on the coast to marry him. Then the farm was a home again and after a while he even forgave the river. But he never took anything for granted after that, knowing that what seemed safe and permanent could be taken away in an instant. Doss too. But when Doss died, he had Joanne and she had him, and Danny was a man finally who could take care of his own.

Danny reached down absently to stroke B.C.'s crooked neck, felt the peck coming without seeing it, and jerked his hand away. "B.C., you're an old son of a bitch. You ever hear how easy duck soup is? Well, think about goose soup." He laughed and walked into the kitchen.

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As always, he" walked softly through the dim rooms to glance into the bedroom. She was there, curled on her side, her dark hair curtaining her face, her arms hugging the pillow. She lay on the edge of her side of the bed as if she'd fallen asleep determined to be untouchable even when he wasn't there. The room was morning cool and Joanne was covered with a sheet. He pulled the spread up over her, but she didn't move. He watched for a moment to see if she was really asleep, and then relaxed to see the steady rise and fall of her ribs beneath the quilt.

Danny shut the bedroom door gently and flipped on the kitchen light. Except for the new stove and refrigerator, Joanne had insisted that the kitchen stay just the way it had always been. It was a good kitchen. Suddenly fashionable again, the old oak table with

red-and-white-checked oilcloth still stood in the middle of the room. The wood stove, seldom used, was there too with his grandmother's rocker beside it. Even the pitted sink with the pumphandle you had to prime to get water. He'd put in real faucets years ago, but Joanne wouldn't let him take the funny old pump out.

The day she'd walked into this room as his bride, she'd touched everything in it lovingly, and then smiled at him.

"I used to come over here to get warm a long time before I thought of you as anything more than a smelly little boy. You thought I had a crush on you, but I came here in spite of you, old Danny. Your mom. Your grandma. They always had time for me, and, if I got something dirty, they didn't act like I'd just walked in with shit on my shoes. My mother spent her whole life wiping things down with Lysol. Even me probably. I shouldn't say that—she tries so hard."