Death in the Pines

by Thom Hartmann

  4

  A cursing man came worming out from beneath the pickup. He had a brush cut, small ears, eyes that were set too far apart, and a little pig nose much too small for his large, square head. “Think that’s got the sumbitch,” the man said. “Jeremiah, turn the spot around.”

  Smith reached to comply. The tow truck’s lights, including an impressive spotlight mounted next to the yellow flashers on top, illuminated the immediate area. “Here’s Oakley back,” Smith said. “Find anything?”

  “Tracks,” I said. “Across the road, leading from the river and back there again. He walked from just below here into the woods, took his shots, then headed down to the river and took off from there.”

  Smith nodded. “Ain’t no amateur. Sure ain’t no kids, like you thought.” He nodded at the man who had just hooked up his truck. “This is Bill Grinder.”

  Bill Grinder wiped his big red hands on a bandanna that might have been scarlet when it was new, took the cigar out of his mouth, flipped a lever and winched the rear wheels of the pickup a few feet off the ground, then put an iron brace in place. “Jeremiah says somebody shot him,” he said to me, half a question half a challenge, as he walked over and stood with us.

  “Looks that way,” I said. In the harsh light, I could see that Smith’s earlobe was pretty badly ripped up, a ragged hole edged with congealed blood that looked black. He had streaks of dark blood on his neck, a spatter of it on his shirt collar, and some clotted blood matted on his gray beard.

  “Jeremiah, I told you already,” Grinder said. “Dammit, let me call the cops.”

  “And I already told you no,” Smith said. “It’d just make the papers and I’d have every snoopy bastard in town at my door, and they couldn’t do a damn thing anyway. He got away.”

  “Shootin’ folks’s a crime,” Grinder said, speaking around the cigar he had chomped down on again.

  “Might have been an accident. A hunting accident,” Smith said in a dry voice.

  “Deer season’s been over for a month.” Grinder replied.

  Smith gave me a sidelong glance that said as well as words could have that Bill Grinder wasn’t the brightest bulb on the tree. “Yeah, but he might have been hunting fox or rabbit. Maybe wild turkey. Some damn thing’s gotta be in season now.”

  Grinder looked at me in frustration. I shrugged and he shook his head and sighed, breath like the breeze off a dung-heap, not sweetened any by the stogie he sucked on. “Oh, hell, it’s your problem. Guess it was just an accident like you say, Jeremiah. You gonna ride into town with me?”

  Smith raised his lopsided eyebrows at me in inquiry and I said, “Up to you. I’ve got a Jeep, can take you in later, or you can call for somebody to pick you up. Maybe you should have a doctor look at that ear.”

  He snorted at the suggestion. “You got rubbing alcohol and a Band-Aid?”

  “I have.”

  He turned to Bill. “I’ll stay on here a bit. We got some talkin’ to do.”

  “Suit yourself,” Grinder said. He took his cigar out, spat, and jammed the slimy butt back into his mouth as he walked around the front of his tow truck, got in, and drove off slowly. The pickup clattered along behind, looking as dead as a gutted deer.

  Back up in the cabin, I put away the shotgun and lit my kerosene lantern. Jeremiah Smith spent five minutes in front of a mirror with the rubbing alcohol and a washcloth and finally decided not to bother with a bandage. “Heals better in the dry air anyhow,” he said. “And I’m too old and ugly to worry about that little missing chunk.”

  He looked out the north side window, then the south side window behind him, then the east facing windows on the front of the cabin. I doubted he could see anything. Deep darkness had settled in. “Only one way out of this place? Don’t seem safe.”

  “You mean if they’re still shooting at us?”

  He tapped the beam he stood next to. “Or if they set fire to the place. Whatever.”

  “There’s a hinged panel in the back wall,” I said, pointing to the wall next to my woodpile. “Hinges on the top, an eyehook on the bottom.”

  “For putting in wood,” he said, catching on at once.

  “Yes, but it’s big enough to crawl through in a pinch. Meet your approval?”

  He shook his head as if at the sorry state of my lodgings, walked over to the straight-backed rocking chair, paused with his hand resting on the hard maple, heaved a deep breath, and said, “You got anything stronger than wine?” He touched the lower part of his ruined earlobe. “Anesthetic,” he explained.

  “Some vodka in that cabinet under the window,” I said. “Should be about full.”

  He snorted, as if vodka were an absurd idea, and sat down, picking up from the floor his juice glass, still about half-full. He polished off the claret with one swallow. “You ready to believe me now? You ready to work for me?”

  “Do you know of any Native Americans living around here?” I countered.

  He didn’t respond for a minute, but poured himself another glass of wine while he mulled that over. “A few. Why?”

  “Just curious. How about a woman in her twenties or thirties named Sylvia?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know anyone of that name. They’s a few Abenaki around. Also some up north, and in Quebec, and in New York. A few in the Northeast Kingdom, maybe a few scattered round about in Maine.”

  “Any other tribes around here? Anybody who lived here before the Abenaki?”

  Smith shook his head. “Don’t know of any tribe could claim that. The Abenaki arrived here when the glaciers receded, around eight thousand or so years ago, and the books all say they was the first humans here. What’s this about Indians, anyhow?”

  I shook my head. “Not important.” The story didn’t bear telling, because it sounded too damn odd in my head as I thought it over. I was beginning to wonder exactly who or what I’d seen sitting on that rock. No coat, yet she didn’t seem cold. No tracks leading there or away. I glanced at the bread on the counter, wondering if it was moldy. Ergot, a grain mold, can produce lysergic acid, the LS of LSD. The woman had been evanescent enough to be a hallucination. Maybe, I thought, stretching the point, I should be buying bread with some nice, healthy preservatives in it.

  “Come on,” Smith demanded, leaning forward. “What are you saying? The guy took a shot at me was an Indian, is that it?”

  “I have no idea who shot at you,” I said, “except that his boots are about a size larger than mine, which is a size ten. So he probably is either wider or taller than me, or maybe both.”

  “And you’re about six foot and, what, one-eighty?”

  “Close enough.”

  Smith shook his head, wincing a little, and I guessed his ear was hurting him more than he let on. “Wasn’t no Indian, I can tell you that.” He took a huge swallow of the wine.

  “You an expert on them?” I said.

  He stared at me for a moment, as if I’d just insulted him and he was trying to figure out whether to throw his glass at me or walk out. I held his eyes for five seconds, and then looked down at the rug. After another ten seconds or so, he said evenly, “You got something against Native Americans?”

  “Absolutely nothing at all,” I said.

  “What if some bureaucrat for the state said that the Abenaki or some others had a claim to your land, that you’d have to pay them or give it up? What’d you think then?”

  I glanced around the room at the exposed rough wood, the junk-shop furnishings, and said, “I think I could walk away from this without too many pained memories. Is that a rhetorical question?”

  “I’m just curious,” he said. “You learn a lot about a man when he’s faced with a tough decision. So what would you do, if you discovered this wasn’t really your land?”

  What a peculiar evening this was turning out to be. I’d started a topic that Smith seemed unable to leave. What the hell. The cabin wasn’t something I had invested much money in, or even all that much time. I knew a man once who live
d on a houseboat and who always said he could watch it sink and then go on and live somewhere else. And old Thoreau again, railing against possessing land, houses, furnishings: Things are in the saddle, and they ride mankind.

  But what would I do if someone tried to take what I had? There is a powerful instinct to defend the cave, to fight against the intruder. And then, for no clear reason, I thought about the woman on the rock. “Smith, why are you focusing on this? Do you know something I don’t?”

  “I’m sure they’s a hell of a lot I know that you don’t. I don’t know nothing about your land, though.”

  “OK,” I said slowly, thinking my way through the answer, “if the Native Americans who once lived here wanted my land back, I’d work something out with them. I’d like to keep some of it, particularly the cabin, and I wouldn’t want them building a casino next door to me, but I’d work out an agreement.”

  “Be easier to just kill them, though, wouldn’t it?” he said with a sudden savage vehemence.

  I stared at him in the light of the kerosene lantern. “And where the hell did that come from?”

  He rocked for a moment, then said, “Well, that’s the way you’ve been handling ’em for the past three hundred years, you white folks.”

  “Like me and Joseph Smith?”

  Jeremiah nodded. “He is an ancestor of mine, that’s the truth. And I’m white, probably Irish and Scotch stock. But my wife, Rebecca, was Abenaki, or at least mostly so.”

  I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “She’s been dead twenty years now,” he said. “One hell of a good woman.” He sipped his wine.

  “All right,” I said. “But tell me about what brought you out here to begin with. Tell me about your grandson.”

  Smith had his face turned toward me, but I had the sense he wasn’t looking at me, just looking back into the past. “He was raised by Susan, our only child. See, a friend of Susan’s got pregnant and there wasn’t any question of an abortion. The girl left the baby over at Susan’s place, that was when she was at Vermont College in Montpelier, and just vanished. Boy was two weeks old. They never did find the mother, and couldn’t even find her family. She was one of those kids, just passing through, you know? The state was full of ’em back then. So Susan got adoption papers, named him Jerry, after me, and raised him. We all thought of him as ours.”

  “Does he know he was adopted?” I said.

  “I expect. I’ve never discussed it with him, but probably Susan did.”

  “And where’s she?”

  “She died of breast cancer two years ago,” he said, his voice blurred. “Seems they’s an epidemic of it in this state. I think it’s got something to do with those injections they give the cows, gets that stuff into the water, the runoff from the dairy farms.”

  “What about the boy’s father?”

  Smith stared at the floor for a long moment, then said, “Dunno. Susan never married and we never did see his birth mother again to ask her. This was thirty years ago, understand. For all I know, the boy’s daddy might have been a soldier and died overseas. Country’s been in enough wars in that time. Or maybe she just didn’t know who it was, if you know what I mean. Things was different then.”

  It wasn’t quite my time—I would have been a kid myself when the boy was born—but I remembered enough to nod.

  Smith seemed lost in a reverie. “You know, the white people here didn’t much like Indians back then, either. Rebecca’s family and a lot of her kin up near Swanton mostly passed for white. Back in the 1930s in Vermont they tried to sterilize all the Abenaki. Before that, they shot ’em, mostly because some Abenaki were partners with the French during the War of 1812. So they got good at hiding. But they’ve always been here.”

  “Your bumper sticker,” I said.

  He nodded. “Yeah. State says the Abenaki don’t exist. Official verdict of the Vermont Supreme Court in 1993, and they read the decision in front of a couple dozen Vermont Abenaki who were standing there waiting to hear what the government was gonna do. The court said they were all killed off or sterilized and because of the ‘weight of history’ for all practical purposes they had no rights to land and legally no longer existed. But they was always here, and they still are.”

  “I wonder if I saw one today,” I said.

  Smith blinked at me. “Pardon?”

  OK, I’d started it. I’d climbed into the canoe spinning down this crazy conversational river, so I might as well put my oar in. I said, “I met a woman, dressed in buckskin, sitting on a stone in the forest when I was coming back from looking for the guy who shot at you.”

  “This that Sylvia? Where is she now?”

  “That’s the strange part. I happened onto her, talked to her for a couple of minutes, took my eyes off her, and she was just gone.”

  Smith nodded as if I’d just described a perfectly ordinary everyday event. He gave me a mirthless smile. “You notice if this Sylvia had real big eyes?” he said.

  “Yes, I noticed that. Her face wasn’t what you would call pretty, exactly, but overall she had a kind of grace, a kind of bearing that made her beautiful. I’d guess she was around twenty, maybe twenty-five, but it was hard to tell.”

  “Nolka Alnôbak,” he said. “No, don’t ask me about it. It’s an Indian word from these parts. We’ll talk about it another time.” He glanced out the dark window as if he expected to see somebody looking in. The windowpane was black and only reflected the light in the room back at us.

  “I don’t know what she was doing here,” I said. “But somehow I don’t think she had anything to do with what happened to us. She told me she heard the gunshots but didn’t see the shooter.”

  “She talked to you.” It was a statement, but implied a question, and he said it in a tone tinged with wonder.

  “A little. I noticed she had an odd way of talking, not an accent, but … odd.”

  “Better to talk about it some other time or in some other place,” he said, glancing toward the window again. “Or not to talk of it at all.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “So!” Smith said, leaning forward in his chair, his tone of voice and posture indicating I’d passed some sort of test. “Considering what somebody done to my truck and tried to do to me, you made up your mind yet? You gonna work for me? How about five thousand dollars as a starter, to give me two weeks of your time?”

  Five thousand dollars. That was a fraction of what John Lincoln and I had charged for a day’s work back in Atlanta. It was a different economy there, though, and we had only worked for corporations. “Go where the money is,” Lincoln often said. The companies have the money, and would easily pay well for good and discreet work.

  But five thousand dollars was a lot to Jeremiah Smith. I could tell by the weight he gave the words. And I was well and truly irritated that someone had the nerve to come onto the land that I called mine and destroy his property and shoot at the man.

  I was already more than halfway persuaded, and Smith’s expression told me he was reading me well. Just to keep him from getting too damn sure of himself, though, I said, “Let me sleep on it. I’ll get back to you tomorrow. You sure you don’t want to call the police?”

  “Hell, no, they’d just make things worse. I want you on this one.”

  I stood up. “Tomorrow. I’ll let you know then.”

  He wasn’t satisfied but left it at that, and a few minutes later I put him into the Jeep, drove him into town, and dropped him off at Charlie-O’s bar on Main Street.

  If I’d known that was the last time I would see him alive, I might have had a few more questions to ask him.

  5

  Julio’s downtown is a no-nonsense diner: no Formica tops, no mounted deer heads, and when it’s your birthday you can order and pay for the special of the day, but no one is going to sing to you. The tables are blond oak, the heavy chairs the same. The china is as thick and substantial as the plates in the better class of prison used to be be
fore the privatization insanity. A coffee cup holds twelve honest ounces and you pay for only the first fill. Julio’s opens at six-thirty sharp. I was there at six-twenty, and Lucille let me in anyway.

  “Don’t think I’ve ever seen you here before noon.” she said. “Breakfast?”

  “I’m supposed to meet someone first.” I had brought a newspaper, and I flopped it down onto the bar and sidelegged onto a stool. “Coffee would be welcome, though.”

  “Here you go.”

  One thing I missed about Atlanta: there the waitresses have a pet name for you the first time they see you. Freshen your coffee up, Sugar? Want a li’l more pie, Honey? Lucille, like the tables and the chairs and the plates, had no air of nonsense about her.

  I pretended to scan the front page of the paper. It had taken me three calls to learn what Caleb Benson looked like and where and when he was likely to have breakfast. I wasn’t about to start anything, but I wanted a look at the man Smith thought was going to kill his grandson.

  At six-forty he came in with one other man. Benson proved easy to spot. He stood six-two with the shoulders of a lumberjack. I guessed he carried maybe 210 pounds, and he carried it well. Jeans, brown cowboy boots, a flannel shirt in a green-and-black plaid. He carried a folded-up orange Financial Times in his right hand as if it were a machete. The man with him was forty-something, dark hair, clean shaven, dressed in new jeans and a custom-made white cotton shirt with a thin blue stripe. He had the aura of an academic and the swagger of a businessman who kept in shape.

  Benson apparently had a regular booth, given the way they went right to it and Julio himself came out to take their order.

  I jerked my head at Lucille. “I’m giving up on my appointment,” I told her. “I’ll just take my coffee back there to a table where I can spread out my paper. If you could do me two eggs over easy, hash browns, and a double order of wheat toast, I’d be a happy man.”

  “You got it,” she said.

  Enough early customers had seeped in so that I was not particularly conspicuous. I meandered back, sipping my coffee, looking down at my folded paper, until I got to a table for two not so far from Benson’s booth. I tossed the paper down and pulled out a chair. Then I spread the paper out and began to read. The president said we needed to tough it out a little longer in Iraq and Afghanistan. A study group was trying to discover why bees were dying. It had begun a couple of years before. It is to bees what the fundamentalist Christians think the Rapture will be to them: whole colonies of bees vanish overnight. If any are left in the hive, they are vitiated and weak and guarding a dwindled queen.