The Buffalo Soldier (8 page)

"And so I have begun to post rules for my men. Rule number one: They have to care for their horses as well as they care for themselves, since a good horse can mean the difference between life and death out here, and a mount's best days are probably behind it by the time it reaches us."

SERGEANT GEORGE ROWE,

TENTH REGIMENT, UNITED STATES CAVALRY,

LETTER TO HIS BROTHER IN PHILADELPHIA,

NOVEMBER 18, 1873

*

Phoebe

In September there were the mannered strangers from Connecticut and New Jersey who bought maple syrup, sometimes two and three half-gallons at a time, and in October there were the busloads of elderly from New York. They bought maple syrup, too, but almost always in pints. They were also likely to buy a good many postcards.

In November the hunters arrived, joining the local boys, and they were some of the biggest spenders the store would see in the course of the year. They viewed the place as a small supermarket, and planned to fill their refrigerators and coolers with provisions for a weekend or a week. They didn't seem to mind paying an extra dollar for a can of coffee, or an extra seventy-five cents for a jar of peanut butter. They were happy to pay for bologna as if it were roast beef, either because in their minds they were now on vacation or because their wives usually did the shopping and they didn't have the slightest idea what things really cost.

In December the skiers would start coming in with some frequency. At least that's what Frank and Jeannine told her. She hadn't worked at the store yet in December. But Frank and Jeannine had owned the place for almost two decades, and they said the store could expect to sell a lot of wine in the heart of the winter, and easily a case of lip balm a day. They didn't get as many skiers, of course, as the towns closer to Burke and Jay Peak, but they still had their share. The store was located about a half-hour from one of the mountains, and forty-five minutes from the other.

And, always, the store depended to a large extent on cigarettes and beer. Pepsi and chips were big, too, and Phoebe thought there were some mornings when she sold literally gallons of coffee, but nothing could compare with cigarettes and beer.

She put the sandwiches she'd made for two unfamiliar hunters in a brown bag, along with the rest of their lunch. They sipped their coffee as they watched her ring up the sale, and she barely heard what they were saying. It was still early--the sky was only now lightening to the east--and she'd been behind the counter barely fifteen minutes.

When they were gone and she was briefly alone, she found herself staring at the front door and wondering if Terry would stop in before either disappearing into the forest or leaving town. She knew he was definitely going home that day (at least that was what he had said), but he'd implied he might first make one last foray into the woods. She wasn't sure what she would say to him if she saw him. She wasn't exactly ashamed of what she had done--what they had done. Shame was too strong a feeling. After all, they had done nothing irrevocable, they had caused no one irreparable harm. Yes, she had slept with a married man, but she'd made it clear to him afterward that she regretted that decision, and under no circumstances should he mistake their tumble for an episode with a future.

At least while he was married.

Still, she wasn't proud of herself.

She told him that if someday he showed up in Montpelier separated or divorced, then maybe they could have a beer together and see where things went. But she also told him that she wasn't sure she would think very highly of a man who left a woman who'd lost both her daughters.

When he first told her about them, she remembered the newspaper story. A couple of kids can't drown in Vermont without it being news, the state's just too small. She thought there might have been a third child--Terry's daughters and one of their friends--but she wasn't absolutely sure. Maybe that third child had simply been with the two girls but hadn't washed away.

She liked to believe that she'd only slept with him because of those girls, but she knew there was more to it than that. It had been a long time, and he was handsome in a military policeman sort of way. His cheeks were slightly hollow, but she imagined that was due to the grief he had shouldered for two years. If he hadn't been a state trooper, she would have guessed he was a career man in the Air Force. Maybe one of those veteran F-16 fighter pilots stationed at the airport in Burlington.

Of all the hunters she'd seen that first weekend of deer season, he was the only one who had bothered to shave every day.

She heard the cowbell on the front door ring when someone pushed it open, and she saw the man Terry had said was his brother. Beside him were the cousins. All three men were wearing their green-and-brown camouflage clothes and orange vests, and she knew it was day four in those duds for each of them. She shuddered when she thought about the socks they were wearing.

There was no sign of Terry, and she concluded that he was now on his way home to Cornish. She was more disappointed than she'd thought she would be.

Quickly she turned and walked back toward the deli section in the store, and tried to busy herself slicing sandwich meat. She knew she'd have to wait on the group soon enough, but this way she thought she might minimize the need for conversation.

She remembered that Terry said Russell spent his life flirting with trouble. Not big trouble, at least not yet, but the sort of stupid things that embarrassed the state trooper. He had a DWI on his record. A misdemeanor conviction for marijuana possession. And though it hadn't led to an arrest, Terry said his brother had once shot a deer near a highway rest area in September, a maneuver that could have gotten him busted for reckless endangerment and fined for taking a buck out of season.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Russell pausing now before the Polaroid she'd taken of him yesterday with his buck, and she saw the other two men grabbing bags of potato chips off a metal rack.

Biggest damn one-hundred-and-fifty-pounder I ever lifted, Russell said, loud enough for his cousins to hear him.

Give it a rest, would you, Russell? one of the cousins said, and she saw he was smiling at his brother at Russell's expense.

I will. It's just...that animal was one heavy son of a bitch for a hundred and fifty, he said, shaking his head. He turned away from the picture and strolled back toward the deli section, and Phoebe knew a little morning chitchat was imminent. She considered getting it off on exactly the wrong foot by asking the man why he had bothered to climb one more time into his camouflage clothes. He had his deer, and the limit was one in the two-week rifle season. But there was no reason to torment Russell just because his brother was sleeping around on his wife.

Or, at least, had slept with somebody else a single time. For better or worse, she'd really believed Terry when he said he hadn't been with a woman other than his wife since they'd been married.

Good morning, Russell said cheerfully.

She looked up and offered him a small smile.

How are you today? he asked.

Oh, fine.

I'll bet.

Was this a confirmation that he knew where, more or less, Terry had been the night before? Had Terry actually said something to him? Or was she reading too much into his two-word response? She wasn't sure, and decided to ignore the inference. She asked him what he'd like.

I'd say I'll have a little of what my brother had, but I'm afraid someone might misconstrue my meaning and I'd wind up getting slapped.

I don't recall what your brother had, she said simply. I've made you boys lots of sandwiches over the last couple of days.

Hmmmm, he said, curling his lips over his teeth as he looked down at the meats and cheeses in the refrigerator case. She realized he was staring at her hips and waist through the glass. There's a lot there I like.

Uh-huh.

But unlike my brother--you do remember my brother, I bet--I'm comfortable having the same thing day after day. I'm just a one-sandwich man, I guess.

He looked up at her and tried to offer what he must have thought was a playfully sanctimonious gaze. But the choirboy eyes didn't fit with the scruffy red beard that had grown on his cheeks and chin over the past couple of days.

Turkey? she asked.

Is that a guess?

No, it's an assumption, she said. I believe we are what we eat.

She held his stare--her eyes wide--until he looked away and murmured, hoping to save face, Turkey will be just fine, thank you very much.

ALMOST AS SOON as she'd made Terry's brother and his cousins their sandwiches and the men had left for the woods, another group of hunters arrived at the store. And then, just before seven-thirty, Frank got there, and Frank and Phoebe together managed the minor crush that descended upon them every day at exactly this time and lasted until about a quarter past eight. There were the men on their way to the day shift at the furniture mill, and the women who worked at the hospital. There would be the people who drove into Newport to work, and at least a dozen different mothers: mothers who brought their children to the bus stop thirty yards from the store, and mothers who for one reason or another drove their children to school. There was always something they needed, even if it was just information about a neighbor. There was nothing that Frank didn't know and wouldn't share if someone asked.

By eight-thirty the traffic had slowed, and would remain a quiet trickle till lunch. Phoebe sat down on the squat bar stool beside the register and watched Frank put in his order with the bread salesman who'd been waiting patiently beside his dolly while they finished with the last flurry of customers.

She kept thinking of the state trooper she'd slept with, and comparing him to the few state troopers she knew. They weren't a single breed, that was for sure, but they all shared one thing: They were control freaks. That wasn't a bad thing--in fact, it was probably a pretty good thing professionally--but it seemed to be something they shared.

They were control freaks and they were decisive.

In an instant she had a vision in her mind of Terry Sheldon sitting in the front seat of his idling green cruiser somewhere on Route 22A, with a silver BMW he has stopped just before him. He was making a flatlander from New York City wait an extra minute or two--stew behind the wheel while his wife and kids watched him, or looked uncomfortably out the window at the woods--before he was issued his ticket, because the New Yorker had the temerity to ask if it was possible that Terry's radar was in error.

Terry probably did such things all the time. They all did. He said there were few things that annoyed him more than someone handling three or four thousand pounds of metal recklessly. Speed and metal were a bad combination, especially in a state in which there were still many more miles of dirt roads than paved ones, and there was a whopping 375 miles of four-lane interstate. The rest of the paved roads were two lanes: picturesque, yes, but also twisting and narrow and filled with people frustrated by the notion that they were expected to drive between thirty-five and fifty miles an hour.

She didn't ask, but she figured Terry had seen some pretty nasty car accidents in his time. She figured he'd seen a lot of nasty things, on and off the roads. Theft. Assault. Women whose men had just beaten the living hell out of them.

Domestic abuse, she knew, was Vermont's dirtiest little secret. The state had only ten or fifteen murders a year, but the vast majority of the time the victim knew the assailant. And though a batterer wasn't likely, in the end, to actually kill the poor woman he had under his thumb, she'd heard far too many tales of wives and girlfriends who'd had their heads rammed so hard into walls there were permanent indentations in the Sheetrock, or who had been bludgeoned with wrenches and shovels and two-by-four pieces of wood.

All that blood and violence and gore. The injuries and the death. It had to affect how the man grieved.

Of course, even when the violence was of the more random sort that plagued less rural states, it had its own twinge of rustic excess. Not too long ago, a lunatic in central Vermont had allowed his grudge with the town clerk to fester, and then decided to shoot the fellow and the town treasurer--a young mother who'd had the misfortune of being in the town clerk's office at the wrong time. Then he grabbed some guy on the road crew who stopped by the office to take a pee, and lit out. Quickly there were troopers on his tail, and after a looping forty-minute car chase along both back roads and the interstate, he holed up inside his cabin and held off the state police there for almost six hours. Supposedly he'd had an arsenal inside with him that would have impressed some Third World nations, and he had ringed the perimeter of his property with bombs.

She knew this had happened somewhere near Hancock, a town not too far from Cornish and Durham.

You had to be impressed with what the troopers had accomplished that day. Somehow they'd convinced the man to walk out the front door without anyone firing another shot, and the fellow from the road crew had dinner that night with his family.

She figured there was a good chance that Terry had been involved. This had happened in his county--in what amounted to his backyard--and by the end of the standoff there were dozens of troopers there. Literally, dozens. She'd seen the pictures on TV.

It seemed to her that you probably wanted someone decisive in charge when there was a madman with a hostage and an armory in his house. Most of the time, all anyone figured the state police did was assist motorists who'd slid off the road, stop people from speeding, and catch unruly kids who were drunk. But there was a lot more to the job than that, and perhaps she could forgive Terry one marital indiscretion.

At least she would try to if their paths ever crossed again. She'd forgive him and she'd forgive herself. But she also wouldn't go out of her way to wind up naked with the man in her friend Rose's trailer.