by Justin Scott
“Can’t tell you, Ben.”
“Well, you couldn’t run the truck up the brook in the woodlots. Too narrow. And you’d need a tractor to climb that upper pasture.”
Nathan Hale was no more loyal to the American Revolution than a Frenchtown twenty-year-old to his truck. Dennis and Albert leapt to the Chevy’s defense.
I said, “You’re not telling me you drove it up where King’s upper pasture touches Butler’s?”
“Damned straight,” said Dennis, and Albert blurted, “We was up there the whole time. Up there the whole time.” Which earned him a boot in the shin from Dennis.
Time to pretend I knew something. “Did Mr. Butler thank you?”
“For what?”
“For helping him free that calf that was stuck in the fence.”
The brothers exchanged a long, long look. Finally Albert said, “We didn’t help.”
“You didn’t offer to help a farmer free his animal?”
Why hadn’t Butler mentioned seeing them?
“We was going to,” explained Albert. “Before we could, the calf got loose.”
“How far off were you?”
Albert considered. Wet his lips. “Quarter mile. We was way up there. The whole time.”
“How did you know it was him, so far away?”
“We got binoculars, Ben.”
“Thousand-dollar binoculars. Gotta turn ’em in when we go home.”
“So of course you didn’t talk to him.”
“They told us not to talk to Old Man Butler.”
“But the real reason you didn’t talk to him is you weren’t close enough.”
“We wouldn’ta anyway, right Dennis?”
“That’s right,” said Dennis, eying me closely.
“What time was this?”
“Three twenty-seven.”
“Exactly three twenty-seven?” The dam had exploded around four-ten. Time enough for Butler to sneak down and light the fuse? Close. “How do you know the time so exactly?”
“We got a clipboard in the truck. Supposed to write down anything we see.”
“We got a clock in the truck,” said Albert. The black four-by was probably the first vehicle he’d ever driven without a hole in the dash where the clock used to be.
“What time did you go up there?”
They answered in syncopation. “Eleven,” said Albert. “Noon,” said Dennis.
“Which was it?”
“Eleven.”
“Noon.”
“What does the log say?”
“Noon.”
“Eleven,” Albert snarled at Dennis. “I wrote it. You was driving. I know I wrote eleven.”
I asked if they had shown the log to the state police. Albert said they turned it in each night with the binoculars.
“What did the troopers say when you told ’em you saw Old Man Butler with the calf?”
“Didn’t tell her.”
“Her?”
“That plainclothes sergeant with the great ass? She was back again, yesterday, asking all this shit.”
“Yesterday?”
“Keeps coming around. Albert says she’s hot for us. There’s some women go for brothers.”
Albert said, “I’m telling you she’s waiting for us to hit on her.”
“Keep in mind she’s armed, Albert. Why didn’t you tell her you saw Mr. Butler?”
“Told you. We got orders. Keep our traps shut.”
“But you just told me.”
“You’re our cousin, Ben. Ain’t nobody can make us not talk to our own cousin. Right, Albert?”
“Right.”
Albert draped a broad paw over my shoulder and pounded warmly. I uttered my next question vibratingly, like Robin Williams doing Ho Chi Minh Trail water-buffalo traffic reports: “Was Dicky with him?”
“Nope,” said Albert.
Dennis said, “He was down at the dam.”
“You saw him there?”
“Heard him there.”
“What do you mean?”
“BOOM!” roared Dennis.
Albert fell off his bar stool laughing and landed with a crash that stopped the jukebox. Dennis doubled over, whooping. I flashed on Dicky’s leg and severed hand, and considered picking up a barstool. But in that moment, Gwen Jervis pushed though the door leading her daughter Josie by the hand.
Every guy in the joint straightened up.
Josie was home on leave, chubby, round and smartly turned out in pressed Army fatigues. She wore glasses and the scared smile of a teenager who was afraid people would stare at her. There was actually little danger of that. Not with her mother nearby.
Gwen Jervis was an angular redhead. Her long legs deserved her tight jeans. Her full breasts did wonders to her baggy sweatshirt. Sometimes she looked mysterious, sometimes she looked dark, sometimes bleak as granite, but today she was grinning triumphantly. And if I knew Gwen, her sweatshirt had an elastic inner liner and she had used her clean-cut Army daughter for cover shoplifting.
The guys in the White Birch greeted her respectfully. One of the more genteel actually tipped his Pennzoil cap. Then a stranger lurched out of the men’s room, a biker from Bridgeport visiting re-hab mates. His red eye fell on Gwen and he blurted an appreciative, “Hey, baby,” illustrating his sentiments by grabbing his crotch with both hands.
Jervis men, hunched over a corner table like kidnappers stuffing envelopes with body parts, looked up. The stranger’s friends pounced from both sides and hustled him off, murmuring urgent warnings. “Jervis…Old Herman’s daughter… dead meat.”
Newbury’s Jervis clan lived in housetrailers, deep in the woods. To tar all of them with the brush “criminal” would be to slander fewer than five percent. They stole cars, hijacked trucks, ran wholesale dope deals, and smuggled guns in partnership with their Canadian cousins.
Gwen’s dad, Old Herman—a ferociously intelligent criminal, who, with different connections, would have flourished in corporate law and been president of his Park Avenue co-op—was clan leader emeritus. Her brother Bill, a multi-murderer with an excellent attorney, had taken over day-to-day operations and by all accounts was proving quite good at it.
Once in a blue moon, some child escaped. Gwen almost did. Almost made it through high school in the teeth of small town bigotry and family resistance. The good folk of Newbury despised Jervises as vehemently as middle class city dwellers loathed crackhouse neighbors, while Jervises regarded the school system as a government plot to make turncoats of their children.
Her son never had a chance; already he was trucking cargos the troopers would dearly love to inspect. But eighteen-year-old Josie was flourishing in the Army.
I went over and bent to kiss Gwen’s cheek. She turned to catch me full on the mouth. Her lips were urgent, her intent both erotic and mocking. (A subtlety I hoped was appreciated by the Jervis men, who were now watching me like disembowlers on their cigarette break.) Gwen was a great mocker, particularly of Main Street pretensions. “Benjamin Abbott III,” she rasped in a deep, husky voice just made for a bar. “cruising the White Birch.”
“Hello Gwen. Hi Josie. How’s the Army treating you?”
Josie ducked her head. She looked terribly unhappy.
“Can I buy you a beer?”
“Sounds good to me,” said Gwen. “Hon, you want a beer?”
Josie mumbled she wasn’t thirsty. Gwen rolled her eyes at the ceiling, and I realized I’d stepped into a mother-daughter thing. “Bar or a table?”
“Table,” said Josie, with a sullen glance at Albert and Dennis, who were swaying on their stools like the initial phases of an avalanche. The jukebox had recovered and was thundering Anthrax. There were few tables. Josie made a beeline for one in the corner farthest from the Jervises. Gwen and I followed.
“Is she okay?”
“No.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I don’t know. I too
k her shopping down the mall. Thought it would cheer her up. She’s moping around like a goddammed teenager.”
“She is a teenager.”
“She’s a high school graduate and a corporal in the United States Army,” Gwen said with immense pride.
“How’d you do at the mall?” Maybe Josie resented being used as cover.
“Smell.” She pressed her wrist to my nose.
“Opium?”
“Poison.”
“Suits you.”
“Up yours, Ben Abbott.”
I grabbed beers for Gwen and me and a can of Diet Pepsi for Josie, who watched me covertly as her mother and I shot the breeze. Suddenly I remembered where I’d seen her last.
I tried to catch her eye. She looked away.
Gwen rasped on. Old Herman, she reported, had a bum knee with arthritis, which he had exacerbated by staying out in the woods all night poaching deer. Brother Pete was drinking like a fish. Brother Bill, the new clan chief, was in Canada. Gwen was vague about the purpose of his journey and one could only sympathize with our neighbors to the north.
After I made several failed attempts to draw Josie into the conversation, Gwen headed for the ladies’ room, cutting a slow swath through the drinkers at the bar, leaving laughter and discreetly admiring glances in her erotic wake.
Josie sat as still and silent as an anvil.
I said, “I thought I saw you at the funeral home.”
“Excuse me?” She looked scared.
“I said, I thought I saw you at the funeral home. When Dicky was there.” She had been on the fringe of a small crowd of the curious, staring at the sealed coffin on which Mr. Butler had wasted a lot of money he couldn’t afford. I hadn’t given it any thought at the time. People had gathered on the cratered sidewalk in front of the Empire State Building, too, to gape at the carcass of King Kong.
I said, “Don’t worry. I won’t tell anybody.”
She whispered, “Dicky said you were real nice to him.”
“Beg pardon?”
Josie glanced at the bar. Her mother was throwing her head back to laugh with Wide Greg. “Dicky Butler. He said you were nice to him.”
“I didn’t know you knew him.”
“He was my friend.”
“I didn’t realize.”
“He was the only person in this lousy town who’d talk nice to me.”
“What do you mean?” As if I didn’t know. Scooter MacKay’s Clarion—arbiter of a Newbury social order that ranked Jervises in a class with rocks and toads—hadn’t even published the Army’s hometown press release that Josie had made corporal.
Tears welled behind her glasses. “He was nice to me. Like you were nice to him.”
“Well, we had something in common.”
But Josie didn’t mean prison. “He told me about the bear.”
“Oh, jeez, the bear. God he was neat.”
“Dicky said he should have hung out with you more. He said he wouldn’t have gotten into so much trouble.”
I said something noncommittal.
Dicky had been blowing smoke. Josie Jervis’ uncles did their time for crime. Dicky, for sheer brutality. A Jervis would crack your head with the express purpose of hijacking your car, or to remind you of payment owed for delivery. Dicky Butler would slug a man to see him fall. That this chubby, childlike Jervis escaper had befriended him was terrifying.
What in hell was I going to say to her? Get a blood test? What else could I say to her? I owed it to the poor girl. And anyone she ever fell in love with again.
“How long are you home for?”
“I gotta report tomorrow. I never used to come home. I had all this leave racked up. So when I met Dicky, I’ve been home a lot.”
“When did you see him last?”
She blushed, bright red. “The night before.”
“The night before?”
“Uhhh. The morning. I mean I drove him home in the morning and he was going to catch some sleep—he was drinking wine all night. So I told him, catch some sleep and I’ll see you later. He wanted to go on a picnic.”
“That morning he wanted to go on a picnic?”
“He’d never been on a picnic. Neither had I till I went in the Service. When the kids did it in school, I couldn’t get to town. The school bus only picked me up for school days and Grandpa wouldn’t let me anyhow. I told Dicky how these friends of mine at Bragg invited me along. So he wanted to try it.”
I was damned curious how a guy would ask his girlfriend on a picnic the same day he was planning to blow up Henry King’s dam.
Cover? Josie for an alibi? A good alibi, if he had laid a slow fuse.
“Where were you going to have this picnic?”
“Out by the covered bridge. There’s a rock in the middle of the river when the water’s low.”
“Great picnic spot.” Sergeant Marian and I had used it more than once. A big flat rock we reached by stepping stones. It was usually private. Although last time, when the Newbury Driving Club came trotting along the river’s edge in their antique carriages and period costume, we had frightened their horses.
The covered bridge was to hell and gone from Morris Mountain so that if Dicky had been planning an alibi he’d have had to lay an unbelievably slow fuse.
“Josie? I have to talk to you.”
“Here comes Mom. Please don’t tell her. She doesn’t know any of this.”
Gwen glided up with a fresh Bud someone had bought her. “What are you two so palsy about?”
“Talking about Fort Bragg. I used to have buddies there.”
“I thought you were in the Navy.”
“They’re good soldiers at Bragg, but I never met one who could walk on water.”
Josie hid a grin and headed for the ladies’ room. Gwen said, “Thanks for cheering her up.”
“She’s a nice kid.”
“How come you never come up for a visit?”
I looked at her, a little surprised, and more than a little interested. “I guess I always got the impression Buddy wouldn’t like it.”
“Buddy’s in fucking Indonesia.”
“Is that an invitation?”
Gwen drank from her bottle and studied me carefully. “Maybe.”
“Sounds like the beer talking.”
“So bring beer.”
I should have made a date right then. But I was worrying that I hadn’t yet warned Josie that Dicky Butler was HIV-positive. And wondering, had it been Dicky’s red wine talking picnic the morning he blew King’s dam?
Josie came back and leaned a fist on the table and said with a firmness that surprised me and stunned Gwen, “Mom, would you excuse us a minute? I have to talk to Ben.”
Chapter 14
I said, “First I have to talk to you.”
She said, “Dicky didn’t do it.”
“Do what?”
“Blow up Mr. King’s dam.”
“Yes he did. We’ll get to that in a minute. There’s something much more important.”
“What could be more important? Don’t you realize what I’m saying?”
“Dicky’s dead. You’re still alive. Keeping you that way is more important.”
Josie shook her head and smiled a private smile.
“What?” I asked.
“We didn’t really do it. You know?”
The private smile made her unexpectedly womanly. Not sexily womanly like her mother—though there was a sexuality to it—but brimful of the wisdom women take for granted and guys keep thinking we’ll get when we grow up, despite the example of our older friends.
“You’re talking about the HIV,” she said.
“He told you?”
“Of course he told me. He was my friend.”
“Did he protect you?”
“You shouldn’t doubt him, Ben.”
I most certainly did doubt him. On his best day Dicky had been a selfish bully. On his worst,
a sociopath. And while I too had fallen more than once under the blinding power of romantic love, I didn’t have to buy into Josie’s take on a Dicky Butler whom I’d known since Josie’s mother was a voluptuous middle school girl-woman with a long red braid.
“We didn’t really do it,” she repeated softly.
We talked for a long time. Her mother watched irritably from the bar. Sometimes Josie blushed. Sometimes she cried. She was eighteen years old, a chubby child who had held herself in check her whole life trying to survive the chaos of the Jervis trailer camp. He had been in his thirties, going on a hundred. My friend, she kept calling him. My friend. How she missed him. Dicky Butler had lifted her eyeglasses off her nose, massaged the red marks, and told her she was beautiful. Because he had called me his friend, and she had no other friends in Newbury, she told me in frank and reassuring detail how he had introduced her to safe sex.
“Dicky had a pamphlet. From the prison?” She giggled. “And I had mine from the Army.”
They’d had good fun comparing them.
“Don’t tell anybody.”
“Of course not.”
“Especially her.”
“That’s between you and your mom.”
Josie glanced her way and announced, matter-of-factly, “She’s jealous I’m talking to you.”
I glanced at the bar. “Well, she’s going to have to get used to having a sexy daughter.”
“I’m not sexy. I’m fat.”
“Sounds like Dicky thought you were sexy.”
I’m here to report that goodly intentioned foot in the mouth does not taste more like dancing pump than sewer boot.
“I can’t believe I’ll never see him again,” she wept.
I said I was sorry. She cried harder. Thank God she had earlier introduced a change of subject.
“What’s this about Dicky didn’t blow King’s dam?”
“He couldn’t have. He was too drunk.”
The boot in my mouth smothered the obvious retort: considering the results, way too drunk.
“Maybe he slept it off?”
“I didn’t get him home ’til almost noon.”
That was cutting it close. “How drunk was he? Too drunk to walk?”
“He was staggering.”
“And the last you saw, you put him to bed?”
