by Tim Poland
And now four. She’d bounced the ant pattern at the end of her fly line off the downed snag angled over the back eddy. It was as if a real ant had fallen into the pool. The fly had dropped dead center atop the eddy and been struck almost immediately. The brook trout’s fins flamed with orange in anticipation of the fall spawning that might have already commenced. It draped well over both sides of her hand, and the weight of it in her palm gave her a feeling of what might have been called gratitude in a language different from the one she spoke here. She shook the water from her hands after releasing the fish back into the pool. The word in that other language for what she felt might have been satisfaction.
Sandy reeled in and secured her line. Her fishing was complete for the day.
The sound came from just upstream, from the rocks above the next pool up from her position. A snap of breaking brush, a rustling of leaves, and something like a single staccato release of breath. Her eyes shifted upslope. Her gaze, accustomed for some time to the rippling surface of the water, resolved into a refreshed focus on the rocks and foliage along the stream, just in time to spy something large fleeing into the brush. In truth, she saw only the leaves and branches shaking in the wake of a large body passing through them, and a fleeting glimpse of its tail. Its impossibly long tail. She kept still, locked in place in the shallows of the pool, her breathing rapid and shallow. Her eyes scoured the slopes above her for any sign, but it had vanished utterly. Gone.
SANDY sat on a rock beside the pool across the clearing from the bungalow, her legs extended into the water up to her calves. She’d made it back to the bungalow nearly an hour before, but she still wore her vest and waders. Stink lay on the bank right behind her, his rear legs stretched out to the side, his snout resting on his front paws. He gave out a slight groan and yip as he pushed himself upright. Sandy turned at the sound and saw him move off across the clearing. Keefe had returned. He’d emerged from behind the bungalow, having come down from the fire road above, and Stink toddled across the clearing to meet him. He wore the battered fedora, as always, and his hands were sunk into the pockets of his baggy khaki pants. He carried no fishing gear. Keefe met Stink halfway across the clearing, scratched around the dog’s neck and head vigorously in greeting, and continued on to where Sandy sat.
“Do any good?” Keefe settled onto the rock beside Sandy.
“Little bit.” Sandy grinned briefly at Keefe, leaned to his cheek with a light kiss, and turned her eyes back to the water. “Very good.”
“I wasn’t expecting you till much later today. To go to the ballgame. Did I forget something?”
Sandy paused for a moment before responding, reminded of her earlier fears. “No, this was an unannounced visit. You didn’t forget anything.”
Stink lapped a little water from the stream and sniffed at a couple intriguing spots along the bank before circling behind Sandy and Keefe and settling back onto the ground.
“Have you been here long?”
“Awhile.”
“Sorry to keep you waiting, my dear. I was walking pretty far up the fire road. Found a pit under some cut logs. Looks as though someone’s been baiting bears. Not sure, but pretty sure. Hope I’m wrong.”
Sandy nodded and listened, took in what he said, but kept quiet for a moment longer before speaking. She leaned forward and rested her elbows on her knees. “Doesn’t a bobcat have a sort of short tail?” she asked. “I haven’t seen one in quite a while. And never up close.”
“Yes, pretty short,” Keefe answered.
“Hmm, I thought so. Then I think I saw a mountain lion. A ways upstream. Not sure. I only saw the tail really. A very long tail.”
Keefe turned his eyes upstream. His breathing grew slower, deeper, as if he were trying to inhale the distant scent, to draw into his lungs the presence of a huge cat roaming the headwaters.
“Do you think it’s possible?” Sandy asked.
“Oh Lord, I hope so,” Keefe said, turning back toward Sandy. “I do hope so.”
Sandy sat upright again, her eyes still on the water, and waited until she could feel Keefe’s eyes on her again. “Edith died.”
“Oh, my dear.” There was no pause, no further inquiry. While those last three syllables hung in the air around her, Keefe’s arms slid smoothly around her, pulled her gently to him, and held her close. Sandy surrendered freely into his embrace, leaned into the flesh of encircling arms that knew the grammar of grief, knew its voice, its idioms, and how to form a response in fitting, intelligible language. She listened through his chest for a pulse of knowing, a throbbing articulation in the native tongue of the headwaters.
EDITH had been right. A good lot of rain coming in, she had said. It arrived that evening, in the bottom of the third inning.
Though Sandy knew nothing of the subtleties of baseball, barely knew the basic rules of play, she was disappointed when the rains came in and the game had to be postponed. She’d been enjoying herself. She found a kind of weathered beauty to the ballfield under the lights. The unseeded worn patches between home plate and the pitcher’s mound touched her with a sense of what she might have called melancholy. Sherwood’s baseball team, the Cougars, were a lower-level minor league team in the Appalachian League. Rookie league, J.D. had called it. The team seemed composed, according to J.D., primarily of Latin American prospects who would swing away here for a couple months, under the watchful eyes of scouts, before being shipped up the line to the next level of minor league ball or back to their native lands. Apparently, baseball at this level didn’t merit the top-of-the-line groundskeeping one found on baseball diamonds at the higher levels.
Behind home plate and on down the first-base line, the stadium was a modest but relatively new structure, built of concrete and brick, with firm plastic benches for seating. An aging, covered wooden grandstand ran along the third-base line. The outfield fence was a rickety affair of wooden planks, painted with fading advertisements for Budweiser, a local hardware store, and the Old Dominion Furniture Company. At most, the stadium might have held eight or nine hundred people, and it was nearly full tonight.
Despite the dilapidated surroundings, after such a volatile day, it felt good to Sandy to be there. It pleased her to look at the precisely laid lines of white chalk demarcating the field. All the struggle that would occur here would be contained within those lines, would transpire according to clearly defined rules, and all she would be called upon to do was watch, offer an occasional cheer of support, while safely seated in the bleachers. Even the tape-recorded national anthem, played on an organ and piped through the ballpark’s crackling loudspeakers, held a certain charm for her. She’d been a bit surprised and intrigued in the way Keefe carried himself during the anthem. Along with the others in attendance, he’d stood and removed his fedora. While others stood with their caps off, hands held over hearts, some singing half-heartedly, Keefe held his hat at his waist, his stony gaze moving slowly over the crowd around him.
Sandy had wondered how Keefe would carry himself in a crowd like this, a man who left his hideaway only reluctantly, perhaps once or twice a month for groceries and to tend to the unavoidable details of paying his few bills and collecting what little mail he got from a post office box. But Keefe had softened after the game got going. He seemed at ease, engaged even. He’d held forth to J.D., something about baseball and the American pastoral myth, and J.D. had listened respectfully, slipping back into the role of student in the presence of his former teacher. But Keefe had also helped Margie’s oldest son, Luke, with his scorecard, showing him how to fill it out and track the game, for which Margie was vocally grateful. The two boys had been squabbling when they arrived, and Keefe served as a buffer between the two, guiding Margie’s increasingly contemplative and withdrawn older son, so Margie could chat with Sandy while better managing her more rambunctious younger son, Matthew.
“Geez,” Margie said, leaning toward Sandy’s ear after getting another hot dog stuffed into Matthew’s mouth. “One needs to be on Rital
in and the other acts like a little monk. Wonder which one takes after his mother, eh?”
Sandy had been a little surprised at the good feeling produced by being at the ballgame, and a little less surprised by her disappointment when the game was called because of the rain. Her day had begun in grief, agitation, and anger, leveled off into sadness and resignation, and resolved into a passing serenity with a good fish at the end of her line in the pools of the upper Ripshin. She and Keefe had sat in silence by the stream for another several minutes that afternoon before going back inside the bungalow. He’d made Sandy a cup of tea, and while he slowly munched at a sandwich, they sat on the sofa as she sipped at the tea and told him everything that had happened since Edith’s death—she left nothing out. When she tried to relate the details and motivation of her impromptu ceremony with Edith’s body in the river, Keefe said nothing. He swallowed the bite he was chewing, wiped his mouth with his fingers, and pressed his lips to her forehead for a long moment. Her narration of striking the nursing-home manager caused Keefe to stop chewing and sit upright, his eyes wide, a hint of a grin twitching at one side of his mouth. She begged a promise from Keefe not to mention the mountain lion to J.D., a promise to which he gladly swore. The preceding twenty-four hours had left her drained, depleted, at the end of one life she thought she understood and at the beginning of another that offered only uncertainty. At the baseball game she had begun to sense the first steps toward replenishment. She had wanted to linger, grateful for the simple, sustaining fare, and felt the disappointment settle in as they all scurried through the rain, Margie’s family to J.D.’s government SUV, Sandy and Keefe to her truck.
They drove back to the headwaters in relative quiet, neither speaking much, focused on the wet pavement before them. South from Sherwood, through Damascus, along the river road, around Willard Lake on the access road to the fire-road gate, the rain remained a steady, persistent downpour. Raindrops flared through the headlight beams as they turned into the entrance to the fire road and trees drew in close around them. Sandy rolled the truck to a stop at the pipe-rail gate, about fifty feet in from the access road.
“I’ll get it.” Keefe fished his keys from his pocket, tugged his fedora down snug on his head, and got out of the truck to open the padlock.
Rain spattered off the brim of Keefe’s fedora and began to soak into his shirt as he worked the key back and forth in the tricky old lock. Sandy watched from behind the steering wheel. An old hand with the quirky padlock, Keefe usually got it open after two or three attempts, but tonight he appeared to be struggling. Suddenly, Keefe’s body seemed to quake all over and from the way his arms thrust and shook, it looked as if he were trying to throttle the old lock. The back of his shirt had grown so damp with rain that it clung to his skin.
“Goddamn this old thing. Why won’t it open?” Keefe rarely cursed. He never got angry.
Sandy stepped from the truck into the rain and walked to his side. She slid her hands over his. His breathing had grown rapid. In the glare of the headlights, she could see outrage and confusion in his eyes as rain ran off the brim of his hat. At the touch of her hands, he turned a startled face to her. For a moment it seemed to Sandy that he did battle with something other than the padlock. She held her hands more firmly around his.
“James.” Her voice whispered through the rain.
His breathing began to settle, the confusion slid from his face. “Forgive me, my dear.”
With her hands on his, they both began to work the key around in the lock. One try. Two. Three, four, five. They were both fairly well soaked but breathing evenly when the lock finally gave on that fifth try. Keefe smiled, somewhat sheepishly, Sandy returned his smile, and the space around them exploded with a massive influx of light. The white beams of the truck’s headlights instantly doubled in intensity, mixed with a manic flashing of blue light. Sandy and Keefe turned abruptly to the sudden surge of light. A patrol car from the county sheriff’s office had pulled in behind them.
With all the lights in their eyes, the deputy was little more than a vague shadow when he got out of his car. Sandy and Keefe couldn’t actually see him at all once he trained his flashlight on them.
“What’s going on here?” the deputy asked.
“Oh, just having the usual fight with this old padlock,” Keefe answered. “But we finally got it. We’re fine, officer.” Keefe lifted the lock from the latch and began to walk the gate open.
“Stop right there, please. Pull that gate closed. I asked what’s going on here.”
The angle of the deputy’s flashlight beam shifted, and Sandy thought she saw his hand move to what must have been a pistol holstered on his hip.
Keefe eased the gate gently closed and shielded his eyes from the blaze of lights. “It’s all right, officer. Just getting the gate open. We live up there.”
We. He’d said it with casual ease, with no more special emphasis than if he’d said the brook trout were hitting on yellow stoneflies. A simple statement of fact. We live up there. Sandy’s eyes slid from the deputy’s flashlight beam to Keefe, and a ripple of liquid warmth ran through her, neutralizing the chill of the rain on her skin.
“I’ll need to see some ID. Let me see your driver’s licenses, please.”
Keefe dug his wallet from his hip pocket, removed his license, and stepped around the truck toward the deputy, extending his arm to the deputy, who took the license from his fingers. Sandy walked immediately to the side of Keefe.
“Mine’s in my purse,” she said. “In the truck.”
The deputy stepped back and to the side, training his flashlight beam on the interior of the truck cab. “Okay. And shut off the engine while you’re in there.”
Sandy switched off the ignition, retrieved her license, and handed it to the deputy.
“Been living up here for years, officer,” Keefe said. “I’m sure you’ll find everything in order.”
“Wait right there,” the deputy said, and began to walk back to his patrol car.
“Might we at least wait in the truck? Out of this rain?” Keefe asked.
The deputy’s flashlight beam turned back on them. “All right.” His voice issued from pure shadow. “Stay right there.”
They sat, dripping wet, in the truck cab, surrounded by the storm of light raging from the deputy’s car. Rain drummed on the roof.
“Most in the sheriff’s office know about this place,” Keefe said. “He must be new.”
“Must be,” Sandy said. She rubbed at her wet, bare arms, trying to revive the warmth of the word we.
After a few interminable minutes, Sandy saw the deputy’s flashlight beam bouncing toward them in her side-view mirror. She rolled her window down to receive their returned licenses, now that their identities had been confirmed. Now that it had been confirmed that they lived there.
“Here’s your license, Mr. Keefe.” The deputy’s hand emerged from behind his flashlight beam. Sandy took the license, passed it to Keefe, and held out her hand for her own license. The deputy opened her door and took a step back.
“Miss Holston, I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to step out of the truck.”
Sandy’s eyes flashed quickly at Keefe, then back in the direction of the deputy. “What? Why?” she asked.
“Step out of the truck, please,” the deputy said. “There’s an open warrant for your arrest.”
“That’s preposterous.” Keefe leaned forward in the truck cab. “There must be some mistake, officer.”
“Stay where you are, sir.” The light from the patrol car’s headlights left no doubt. Sandy could see the deputy’s free hand rise to the butt of the pistol in his holster. “Out of the car, ma’am. Arrest warrant was issued this morning. Charge of battery. You struck a coworker.”
Sandy’s eyes locked for a moment on Keefe’s as she stepped slowly from the truck cab and back into the rain. They looked at each other with shared, furtive recognition. She’d told Keefe everything about the morning, and they both realized the s
ituation at the same instant. The manager at the nursing home. She’d filed a complaint.
“Place your hands on the truck and spread your feet, please.” The deputy’s detached, professional demeanor struck Sandy as curious, considering the emotional fervor of her action that morning, which had brought her to this point.
The deputy shut off his flashlight and holstered it on his belt. Light from headlights and his flashers remained more than adequate. He patted Sandy down quickly, his hands never lingering long on any one part of her body.
“Really, officer,” Keefe complained. “Is this necessary?”
“Quiet, sir. Don’t move. I won’t say it again.”
The deputy produced a set of plastic handcuffs, pulled Sandy’s arms behind her, and affixed the restraints while intoning the terms of her arrest and her rights in the same cold, mechanical voice he’d employed throughout the encounter. Sandy gazed through the windshield at the shadow of worry on Keefe’s face. We live up there.
“It’s all right, James.” It looked to her as if his breathing was again becoming agitated. “Really, I’ll be all right. Edith’s lawyer’s name is on a sheet of paper in my purse. I guess, call him.”
“Of course, my dear,” Keefe said. “Immediately.”
“No,” Sandy said. “Stink’s shut in the cabin. Take care of Stink first.”
Keefe’s eyes glanced past the headlights to the blackness of the fire road leading up to the bungalow.
“Promise. Take care of Stink first,” Sandy said.
“I promise. Of course.” Keefe sighed audibly, angrily as the deputy began to lead Sandy back to the patrol car. “Outrageous.”
The deputy paused at the open door of the truck, his grip firm on Sandy’s upper arm. “Stay right where you are, Mr. Keefe, until I’ve left with Miss Holston. Then you’re free to go.”
