Salt River (7 page)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Jed Baxter, who wanted to know where the hell Eldon had gone to;

Mayor Sims, who came bearing go-cups of coffee then casually got around to asking if it might be possible for "the office" to do a background check on Miss Susan Craft up Elaine way;

Dolly Grunwald from the nursing home, brought in by one of her nurses, with the complaint that they were poisoning her out there;

and Leland Luckett, who parked his shiny new Honda out front of City Hall with the butt of the buzzard who'd flown into the windshield pointed to the door of our office. He'd just been driving along when the thing flew straight at him, right into the windshield. Like a damn missile, he said. It was quite a sight. Thing was the size of a turkey, and stuck in there so firmly that it took the two of us to pull it loose. I'm still not sure what else Leland thought I could do for him. In exasperation I finally asked if he thought my arresting the damn bird, dead as it was, would be a deterrent.

Afterward I walked across the street to the diner for coffee and a slice of What-the-hell pie. Most places would just call it Pie of the Day, something like that, but Jay and wife Margie took notice of how many people said "Just a cup of coffee" only to add "What the hell—a piece of pie, too." Not surprisingly, since everyone had been watching out the front windows, most of the conversation was about Leland and his buzzard.

Margie came out from behind the counter to take my order and ask if I'd heard about Milly Bates. Everybody'd noticed how shaky she looked at Billy's funeral. Not just in pain or overwhelmed, Margie said; it was like you could see through her. Then this morning her folks'd gone over to check on her and she was gone. House wide open, no note, nothing.

"What about the car?" I asked.

"In the driveway. But it hadn't been running for weeks, someone said. The sheriff—" She stopped, realizing her blunder, embarrassed by it, but for me, not herself. "Lonnie, I mean—is checking on it. Coffee?"

"Coffee."

"And . . . ?"

"Just coffee. To go."

I drove out that way with the coffee in the cup holder on my dash. At some point the lid slipped and coffee sloshed over the dash and floorboard, and I barely noticed. I was busily trying to put things together in my head, things that in all likelihood didn't even belong together, a confused young man's death, an old woman who'd lost everything, now Milly.

Lonnie's car stood by the house with the driver's door open and its owner nowhere to be seen. It was his wife's car really, but after giving up the job and Jeep he'd "taken to borrowing it," and after close to a year of that, Shirley had gone out without saying a word to him and bought a new one just like it. The door to the house was open, too. Inside, flies shot back and forth like tiny buzz bombs, and I followed them to the kitchen where a table full of food brought around by neighbors and friends—a roasted chicken, casseroles, slices of ham, dinner rolls, cakes—sat mostly untouched. The coffeemaker was still on, with a few inches of coffee that looked like an oil spill; I turned it off. On the refrigerator alongside were a shopping list, discount coupons, a magnetic doll surrounded by clothing and accessories, also magnetic, and an old Valentine's Day card.

Lonnie spoke from behind me. "Milly and me, we never saw much of each other."

One thing about living in a town this size is, you pretty much know what goes on between people without it's ever being said. One thing about living these fifty-plus years and having a friend like Lonnie is that when it does get said, you know to keep quiet.

"Boy had a hard life," Lonnie went on. "Not making apologies, and I know he brought a lot of it on himself. But there wasn't much that was easy for him, such that you had to wonder what kept him going."

I had been wondering that, ever since I could remember, about all of us.

"Milly married him, she took that trouble, Billy's trouble, to herself. And now . . ." He stared at flies buzzing into covers and containers, bouncing off, hitting again. "Now, what?"

"You sure you want to be out here, Lonnie? Shouldn't you be home with Shirley?"

"Too much silence in that house, Turner. Too much . . ." He shook his head. "Just too much."

In my life I've known hundreds paralyzed, some by high expectations, others by grief or grievous wounds; finally there's little difference. That's where Lonnie was headed. But he wasn't quite there.

"Footprints out back," he said. "Two, three men. Cigarette stubs mashed into the mud."

"Like they were there for a while."

"Could just be friends . . . Whatever tracks there were out front are mostly gone, from the rain. Took a look around back, though. Old soybean fields out that way. And someone's been in there recently, with what looks to have been a van, maybe a pickup."

"No signs of a search, I guess."

"Hard to say. Milly wasn't much of a housekeeper. Picking up Cheetos bags and wiping off counters with a damp rag being about the extent of it. Drawers and closet doors open, clothes left where they fell—all business as usual."

"Speaking of which—"

"Clothes? No way to know. And no one close enough to be able to tell us."

"So except for some tire tracks and a few cigarette butts that for all we know could have been a friend's, we have no indication that anything's amiss here. She could just have packed up and left."

"Without warning, and with her entire family here."

"People in stress don't plan ahead, Lonnie. They panic, they bottom out. They run."

"Like Billy did."

"As we all have, at some point."

"True enough." Stepping up to the kitchen table, he removed the clear plastic cover of a cake with white frosting. Flies began buzzing toward it—from the entire house, it seemed. "In the bathroom. There's a bottle of antidepressants, recently refilled, and a diaphragm on the counter in there. How likely is it that she'd leave those behind?"

We went through the house room by room. No sign of purse or wallet. There were two suitcases, bought as a set and unused, smaller one still nestled inside the larger, in a closet. In the bedside table we found the checkbook, never balanced, and beside it, nestled among a Bible, old ballpoints and chewed-up pencils, Q-tips and hairpins, we found a cardboard box in which, until recently, a handgun had made its home.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

So many people come into our lives, become important, then are gone.

Back in college, back before the government jacked me out of my shoes to drop me in jungle boots that started rotting from day one, I had an astronomy professor who compared human relationships to binary stars endlessly circling one another, ever apart yet exchanging matter. Dr. Rob Penny was given to fanciful explanations of the sort, amusing and embarrassing a classroom filled with freshmen there only because astronomy was the easy science credit. Planetary orbits, fractals and star systems, eclipses—all met with his signature version of the pathetic fallacy. Incipient meddler in others' lives that I was even then, I often wondered about Dr. Penny's own relationships.

Lonnie was at State headquarters co-opting their resources to do what he could about finding Milly, June was up at the colony with a handful of townspeople (including, to everyone's astonishment, Brother Davis) helping them rebuild, and I was answering the phone.

Jed Baxter had been in earlier, spitting and chewing scenery and saying over and over that I just didn't get it, did I, telling me how he had come all this way expressly to give Eldon a chance, then telling me he was heading back to Fort Worth. For a moment—something in his eyes—I actually thought he was about to say "back to God's country."

So I was answering the phone, and everybody in town or nearby was on the other end. Wanting to know

what was going on with the sheriff's daughter-in-law,

if someone could come out and talk to the senior class about careers in law enforcement,

why people were up there in the hills helping those weirdos when their own town could use a good cleanup,

what we were going to do about daughter Sherri Anne who kept going off with that no 'count Strump boy,

what the old military base out by the county line was being used for, because they'd been seein' strange blue lights over that way late some nights,

whether there was an ordinance against someone keeping pet snakes,

and again, off and on the whole day, what was going on with Milly, had we found her yet, they heard there was blood at the scene, we should check with her cousin in Hot Springs, did we know she'd been seen in the company of that Joseph Miller person who'd recently up and moved here from Ill-uh-noise.

Between calls I did some of the things I most dislike doing: checked invoices and bills, marking the ones June should pay; organized the papers on my desk into four piles every bit as confusing as the single pile had been; and read through our voluminous backlog of arrest records (there were two). When I looked up, Burl Stanton was about a yard away from my desk, standing quietly. I hadn't heard him come in. But then, I wouldn't.

Burl is our local career vet. Most every town has one or two of them. He reminded me of Al, the ex-soldier, ex-fiddle player I'd befriended as a child. Al worked in the icehouse until it closed, then lived mostly on the street. Burl hadn't lost near as much as Al, but after six years as a ranger, after all he'd seen, he had no further use for society. He just damn well wanted to be left alone, and this was one of the few places left in the country that, if you damn well wanted to be left alone, people damn well did. He had a shack out by the old gravel pit, but spent most of his time ranging through the hills.

"Two men," Burl said. I waited. He wouldn't be here, in town, still less in this office, without good cause. And he had his own manner of talking, words alternately squeezed out and spurting, like water from old pipes. "Tracked them."

One of the men had been carrying the other—something Burl had seen a lot back in country, and what must have got his interest in the first place. He'd caught sight of them down one of the hollows, pulled back as they came up the hill, then fell in behind. The carried man was hurt bad, blood coming off him hard, and after a mile or so of stumbling along, barely staying afoot, the other one gave up, dumped him there. "Kin show you," Burl said. He'd lost interest at that point and backtracked the two men to where they'd started. They'd come a piece on that one man's two legs. All the way from the chrome-bedecked van where Burl found an unconscious woman. The van was lying on its side. "Looked like it done played pinball with more than one tree," Burl said. The woman was trapped partway beneath. He'd had to snap off a sapling, lever the van up with one hand, and reach in and get hold of her with the other. "Don't think I hurt her much extra."

Then Burl had fashioned a travois from saplings and vines and brought her all the way to town on it. Dropped her at the hospital, but they kept asking him questions, so he came here. He didn't have no answers for them.

Doc Oldham and Dr. Bill Wilford were standing alongside the gurney when I got there, each doing his level best to defer to the other. Finally, with a shrug, Doc went to work, Wilford assisting. The small ER reeked of fresh blood, alcohol, and disinfectant. One of the exam lights overhead flickered, as though the bulb were going bad. I remembered how field hospitals would be filled with the stench of feet shut up in boots for weeks, a smell so strong that it overpowered those of blood, sweat, chemicals, piss, and cooked flesh.

It was Milly. And it would be some time, Doc told me as he worked, before he'd know much of anything. Looked like a crushed chest, fractured hip, multiple compound fractures—for starts. Spine seemed intact, though. Lungs and heart good. Pressure down, but they were pumping fluids in as fast as they could. I might as well go about my business.

Outside, the day was bright, the air clear, giving no hint of devastations recently wrought, or of those to come.

I was able to get the Jeep within sight of the crash site. Burl sat beside me looking grim the whole time. He didn't care for motorized vehicles much more than he did for towns. Had too many of them shot out from under him back in the desert, he said.

The road was dirt, naturally, one of hundreds that crisscross these hills, and barely the width of the vehicle, with layer upon layer of deep-cut ruts and damn near as many recent washouts. Now, it was primarily mud. Their being up here, on a road like this, made no sense at all. And how they'd got as far as they did in that lame tank of theirs was anyone's guess.

The van was a glitz-and-glory Dodge, with enough chrome on it to look as though it might have escaped from some celebrity chef's TV kitchen. The sapling Burl used to free Milly was still there, half under the vehicle. Ants and other shoppers had found the blood. There were banners of duct tape on the front passenger seat. Doc had said much the same of Milly's clothing.

Most of the windshield was gone, the remains scattered about. I kicked at them, bent over, and picked up a floppy piece with a puncture surrounded by starring. So the shot had come from behind. Blood-and-meat splatter on the windshield fragments and on the dash where the insects were chowing down. I found the handgun eight or nine yards off, plunged into the ground muzzle-first as if planted there and just starting to grow.

The driver had been shot as the three of them slithered and slid along. With Milly taped into the passenger seat, apparently. Why? Why did they have her in the first place, why were they on this road that led essentially nowhere? And who made the shot? The half-buried handgun was a .38, same as the one that came out of Milly's bedside table. But Milly was in the passenger seat, and the shot had come from behind. What possible reason would the second man have had to shoot his driver partner? And if he did, why then would he sling the man across his back and try to carry him out?

Way, way too many questions.

Not to mention who the hell were these guys in the first place.

I looked around some more—as J. T. had discovered, it wasn't like city work, with crime-scene officers, an ME, half the police force, and maybe a coffee runner or two at your beck and call—and figured I'd best give State a call, have them come down and get a fix on this. With some reluctance Burl got back in the Jeep and directed me to the dead man. There were snails all over his face. Something, a dog most likely, had eaten four fingers.

Burl helped me roll the man in a tarp and load him in the back of the Jeep, then said he'd be heading out if I didn't need him for anything else. I thanked him for being a good citizen, and at that he laughed. Stood peering closely at me in that way he had, not blinking.

"Don't know what went down here," he said. "Don't much care. But a man dies, it needs to be marked."

Simple sentiments divested of qualification or abstraction, plainly spoken—just as the speaker was out here attempting to lead an unabstracted life. It was foolishness, but it was a damned near heroic strain of foolishness.

Driving back I thought how, as Americans, there are mountain men or cowboys inside us all, Henry David Thoreau and Clint Eastwood riding double in our bloodstreams and our dreams.

Always slow off the block, I didn't have my first tree house till I was fifteen. Just past the backyard, a hill swelled, partly cut away and thick with trees, a remnant of wilderness tucked into one far corner of our property, jutting out above the chicken-wire run where my father kept his bird dogs. I had his permission, and a stack of lumber from a feed shed he'd torn down a while back. Just watch for nails, he said.

For weeks I prepared. Took graph paper I hadn't used since fifth grade and drew up plans. Dad had passed along a number of his old tools; I put them, along with a tape measure heavy as an anvil, in the shoeshine box he'd built me when I was ten or so. Struggled up the hill with two or three planks or two-by-fours at the time and left them there in piles roughly sorted by length. Had the wheelbarrow up there too, complete with jelly jars of nails and brackets, a bunch of rags, a carpenter's level, and a spot for a pitcher of red Kool-Aid. I was ready.

I went up the hill Saturday morning at eight after scarfing down the oatmeal my mother insisted upon. In turn I insisted upon taking lunch, peanut butter and apple-jelly sandwiches, with me. Dad came up around noon to see how I was doing, then a few hours later to tell me I should think about coming on down, then finally to fetch me back to the house.

I was at it again, not long after daybreak, on Sunday. And for the next two weeks I was obsessed. Up there after school until dark, one night even talked Mom and Dad into letting me take along an old kerosene lantern and hang it from a limb. Put the frame and floor down three times before I got it plumb, planed and whittled at boards till they fit together for walls, corners had to be aligned just so. I pulled old nails and filled the holes, sawed off ends, sanded out rough spots.

The tree house was completed late Saturday afternoon. I'd even built in benches along two sides, and a tiny porch out front. I sat on that porch most of the rest of Saturday and Sunday.

After that I rarely went back. From time to time I'd idly climb the hill and check, watching as it slowly came apart. Years later, back from jungles half across the world and on a rare visit, I wandered up there after dinner and came upon it, surprised. I'd forgotten my tree house. Little was left, a few floorboards and fragments of wall, rusted nails in the trees. On one of the remaining boards a mockingbird had built its nest.