Yellow Stonefly

by Tim Poland

  “Outrageous,” Keefe muttered again as the deputy led Sandy to the patrol car and tucked her into the rear seat.

  Despite the deputy’s warning, Keefe emerged from the cab and moved slowly around the far end of Sandy’s truck. He stopped at the driver’s-side door and watched through the rain, his movements apparently not sufficiently threatening to further incite the deputy.

  While the deputy radioed in his situation, Sandy looked past the shadow of his flat-brimmed hat to where Keefe stood at the gate to the headwaters, upright under his drenched fedora in the roar of headlight beams and blue flashers. She had come to the Ripshin River Valley five years before to escape a criminal, and now she had become one, handcuffed in the back seat of a patrol car. She had sought solitude and been ambushed by love.

  We live up there.

  Autumn

  11

  KEEFE HAD BEEN QUIET AND WITHDRAWN MOST OF THE morning. He worked slowly, methodically, bent over his fly-tying bench, his eyes zeroed into his magnifying loop, focused on the tiny fly taking shape in the vise. The cold dregs of his second cup of coffee sat in a white mug at the edge of the bench. A cigarette butt lay bent and mashed in the ashtray. He’d been in the same position since Sandy woke three hours earlier, barely moving, except for the skilled motion of his hands around the vise. He hadn’t really spoken at all.

  Most times, in the past, she wouldn’t have given much thought to Keefe pulling away into some private distance. She’d seen it often enough. And understood it well enough. From the very first time she’d found her way inside this place, she’d had a sense that the bungalow was an arena of sorts, in which Keefe engaged in some form of personal, interior combat. After her presence here had become a fairly regular feature, there had still been times when that presence appeared to be inconsequential, perhaps even unmarked by Keefe. If anyone could understand the occasional need to recede within a shell of solitude, it was Sandy Holston. Even love, if it was love, need not, could not, demand the constant presence and attention of the beloved.

  Stink lay in his usual spot on the sofa, snoring vaguely, and Sandy sat beside him, sipping another cup of tea and aimlessly scratching behind his ear. Before the night of her arrest, she had often sat contently in the bungalow while Keefe remained silently intent on his work at the bench. Why now did his back turned toward her, positioned that way simply due to an arrangement of furniture, feel like a barricade? Had she become greedy? We live up there. He had spoken the words casually. Had he meant them just as casually? A practical configuration of words intended merely to offer a reasonable explanation for both of them being there at the fire-road gate that night when the deputy appeared? Had she taken his words too literally? She had, during the two weeks since her arrest, spent most of her days and nearly all her nights here at Keefe’s bungalow. Had she overplayed it? Had she pushed it too far, that rush of warmth in the rainy night? Had one loss led her to some unreasonable fear of another, so much so that she was reluctant to allow what she loved out of her sight for long? She’d been a daughter, a wife, an ex-wife, even a widow of sorts. Yet she was still a fledgling, so new to this business of loving.

  Or perhaps it was just the rain. Perhaps it had just driven human life too far indoors, had confined bodies within quarters too close for too long, for the sake of shelter. The rains had arrived in the bottom of the third inning of what turned out to be the last home game for the Sherwood Cougars that season. Since that evening when it left Keefe doused, standing alone in the glare of headlights while Sandy was carted off to the sheriff’s office, the rain had been general throughout the Ripshin River Valley, throughout the entirety of the Rogers Ridge watershed. Until just the day before, there had not been a day without rain. The web of runs and washes coming down the slopes had swollen and churned up the lower Ripshin, already flowing above its usual levels due to the increased release of water from Willard Lake through the hydroelectric dam. Word was making the rounds of the valley that if these rains kept up much longer, they’d have no choice but to open the floodgates above the spillway of the dam, which would guarantee one hell of a downstream mess. And more rain was in the forecast. One bit of local gossip had it that the leader of the commune that owned and operated the Damascus Diner had identified in the relentless rains—along with a modest earthquake in northern Virginia and television coverage of a series of tornadoes ripping through the Great Plains—confirmation of the approach of the end of days. One version of the story said he had settled on a specific date and ordered his followers to begin preparation for the final rapture, but most valley residents said you could never tell about those folks back there off Wilson Hollow Road. The upper Ripshin was up and surging, far too deep and forceful for wading, for fishing, but still running fairly clear, only slightly muddied, more of a source for the threat of flooding downstream than for any dangerous flooding here on the slopes of the headwaters themselves.

  Keefe glanced only briefly over his shoulder when Sandy opened the front door of the bungalow. She held the door open a moment and looked at her dog to see if he wanted to go out, but Stink displayed no interest in leaving the sofa. Sandy sat on the top step of the porch. Through the seat of her jeans she could feel a chill damp from all the recent rain. Even from her side of the clearing, the roar of the current through the pool was loud. The sun, so rarely seen of late, had just cut through a scattering of clouds above the ravine, painting a bright band through the treetops up the slopes around the clearing. In the sudden spray of light the forest looked washed clean. The dark green of the rhododendron, pine, and hemlock shone, wavering in the breeze, above the spongy ground. Some of the earlier hardwoods had begun the transformation to the dull browns and the reds and yellows of the season; other species would later commence the ebb into dormancy charted by the gaudy explosion of color.

  The sound of a vehicle rumbling up the fire road cut down the slope through the trees to Sandy’s ears. That would be Margie and J.D. and the boys, right on time. A couple more minutes and they would bump and wind their way down the gravel drive and into the clearing. Sandy wondered if Keefe would emerge from his remote shadows when they arrived.

  Once locked into the back seat of the deputy’s patrol car that night, Sandy had settled against her forearms and wrists, pinned and cuffed behind her back. As the deputy backed away from the fire-road gate, she’d watched Keefe recede out of the headlight beams, fading into the rainy night, and it all seemed fitting to her somehow. Perhaps inevitable. Certainly familiar. The deputy signed off his radio and accelerated out onto the access road, and Sandy’s private history began to cohere, to encircle her and snap into place like the handcuffs around her wrists. An arc had been completed as she once again left a man marooned and confused, a man whose puzzled gaze tracked her departing figure, wondering just exactly what it was his eyes trailed after. In the befuddled, stunned look on Keefe’s face as the patrol car backed away she recognized a matured twin of the shock on Vernon’s face when she abandoned him to the prison guards and fled the clearing along Dismal Creek so many years before. Vernon had sought to possess her, had called it love, and had been destroyed by her refusal to be contained within his version of her. Keefe had sought only to be left alone in his headwater hideout, yet she had pushed her way into his life, had further entrenched herself there, for something she had yet to fully understand but for now called love. The result appeared the same—a baffled man standing alone and wet on the edge of a wild place. The handcuffs were appropriate. She was a criminal. She was guilty, though of precisely what crime, she could not be quite certain.

  And yet Keefe had come through, had risen to the occasion, slipped free of that confusion she recognized, and stirred into action. There had, of course, been no answer at the lawyer’s office at that hour of the evening, but Keefe had left a message, emphasizing the urgency of the situation. Before he’d gotten Stink up into his own truck for the drive to the sheriff’s office in Sherwood, he’d had the good sense to call Margie and J.D., who lived i
n town and might get there more quickly. As he said to her later, “certainly a time to rally the troops.”

  ONCE they’d arrived at the sheriff’s office that night, the deputy maintained his detached, professional demeanor, leading her into the office by a strictly ceremonial, light touch applied to her pinned arms. Most startling to Sandy was the brightness of the light inside the sheriff’s office. Her eyes long adapted to the night and the darkness in the rear seat of the patrol car, she blinked, nearly blinded by the panels of fluorescent lights in the ceiling of the office. The glare was then multiplied by the shine from the beige linoleum of the floor. A female deputy, probably close to Sandy in age, with her hair pulled tightly into a ponytail, sat behind a microphone on a stand at the dispatcher’s counter. The deputy escorting Sandy looked at the dispatcher and nodded toward his prisoner. Behind the dispatcher’s counter were four identical desks, and the deputy led Sandy through the room to a desk near the far wall. He pointed to a straight-backed chair beside the desk that faced toward the wall. “Have you a seat there, ma’am,” he said.

  The deputy removed his hat, and in the blazing light of the office Sandy could see his face clearly for the first time. His hair was red and closely cropped, his cheeks deeply ruddy. As Keefe had speculated, he was probably new on the job. He couldn’t have been older than his mid-twenties.

  He stepped away, peeling off his raincoat, then shook off the last drops of water and hung it on a hook on the back wall. To his left was a small holding cell, no more than a large cage made of chain link. On the single bench inside the cage a man in wet denim lay sprawled along the bench, flat on his back, one arm dangling to the floor, his mouth wide open. The deputy walked to the dispatcher’s counter, collected a couple sheets of paper, and exchanged a few words with her. He walked around a corner and out of view for a moment, then reappeared, carrying a towel, and returned to the desk where Sandy waited.

  “Here.” The deputy dropped the towel into Sandy’s lap, reached behind her, and freed her from the plastic handcuffs. “You can dry off a bit with that.” Sandy looked down at the towel and realized she was still soaked from standing in the rain at the fire-road gate.

  While the deputy filled out the arrest report, Sandy ran the towel over her arms and hair as her eyes wandered from the deputy at the desk to a small bulletin board hanging from the wall behind him. A crumpled sheaf of old FBI wanted flyers stapled to the bulletin board looked to be old enough that the grainy photos would be of little use in identifying any of the criminals still at large in the world. Tacked up beside the wanted flyers hung another flyer, newly printed on crisp green paper, announcing the pancake breakfast sponsored by the Sherwood Kiwanis club scheduled for the coming weekend. From beneath it peeked another old, crumpled flyer. Sandy recognized it. One of the flyers about the disappearance of Randy Mullins that began to show up all over the Ripshin Valley that spring. Sandy looked back at the deputy, hunched over the forms on his desk, and wondered how many different versions of her encounter with the nursing-home manager that morning had by this time been unleashed by Joyce Malden.

  “Sandy, my God. What the hell?” Margie’s voice flowed through her like warm honey.

  Sandy turned to see her friend charging past the dispatcher’s counter toward Sandy, with J.D. quickly closing behind her.

  “Ma’am, stop right there.” The dispatcher’s warning coincided with J.D. catching his wife’s arm.

  Margie’s eyes, darting back and forth from Sandy to her husband, flickered with a combination of fear and outrage. J.D. shook his head at her and motioned for her to sit on one of the molded plastic chairs across from the dispatch counter. Margie sat, but Sandy could see her friend’s agitation. J.D. raised his hand to greet the deputy. “Ronnie,” he said. Of course J.D. would know him. As a regional game warden, he would have come to know local law enforcement officers in the course of his job.

  “J.D.” The deputy nodded almost imperceptibly.

  “Could I have a word?” J.D. asked.

  “Be right with you.” The deputy continued filling out the arrest report for another minute. “Remain where you are, Miss Holston,” he said before getting up from his seat at the desk and walking over to J.D., the arrest report fluttering from his fingertips.

  The deputy and J.D. huddled together, speaking quietly, and Margie rose to join the huddle. Margie’s arm rose, pointing toward the hallway that disappeared around the corner, and J.D. lowered his wife’s arm gently. Another deputy appeared from around the corner and walked to the dispatcher. He’d begun to speak to her when she turned away to take a radio call, and the other deputy walked to the back of the room, collected his hat and rain slicker from a hook on the wall. He returned to the dispatcher, took a slip of paper from her, and left. Margie began to march down the hallway, but J.D. restrained her, clearly imploring her to stay calm and wait in the chair where she’d been sitting. She looked about to explode, but she sat nonetheless. J.D. nodded to the deputy, shook hands with him, and walked around the corner after eliciting one more promise from his wife that she’d stay put.

  Sandy turned away, staring blankly at the bulletin board. She wished the holding cell where the drunk lay were empty, that the deputy had locked her inside that cage instead of leaving her parked in a chair. The chain-link cage would confirm her criminal status, clarifying her vague position as a woman left alone, in damp clothing, clutching a soggy towel, under glaring lights. If she were locked in the cage, the isolation she felt would have a tangible, visible form. The cage would corroborate her guilt, provide a physical structure for how she had been removed from the negotiations of her life while others were left to clean up the consequences of her actions.

  “Oh, there you are. They won’t let us even talk to her.” Margie’s voice indicated the arrival of Keefe, but suddenly a wave of shame ran through Sandy. She remained facing the bulletin board and closed her eyes.

  “Professor Keefe.” The voice of the dispatcher rose to a high, girlish pitch. “I don’t suppose you remember me. It’s been a long time, but I was in one of your classes at the community college.”

  “Yes, of course.” Keefe’s response was low, barely audible to Sandy. What he said next rang in her ears like a bell. “I’m with her.”

  Sandy opened her eyes and turned to catch the gaze of an aging man in a wet fedora who was being forced to navigate channels for which he had no chart. And yet he had come for her. Love and shame rose in her throat simultaneously, nearly choking her. Edith was dead. Margie was here. Keefe was here. I’m with her. We live up there. The words ran through her like a braided current flowing into the same pool from two streams.

  Sandy carried love and shame like a stone on her tongue as she was led through the remainder of the process she’d initiated when she slapped a well-groomed woman that morning. The arresting deputy remained reserved and professional as he filed the arrest report and led her around the corner and down the hallway to the office of the magistrate on duty that night. Margie and Keefe followed close behind. J.D. stepped out of the magistrate’s office when they arrived. She was officially charged with simple battery, a misdemeanor, she was informed. Thanks to J.D.’s intervention, the magistrate agreed to release Sandy on her own recognizance. Thanks to that and, according to J.D., the sheriff’s office being as understaffed as his own, there was no one available to transport her to county lockup. Her driver’s license was returned to her, and she was told not to leave the county. An official summons for what the magistrate referred to as a bench trial would be forthcoming. After articulating the serious consequences of any failure on her part to appear for that trial at the appointed date and time, the magistrate released Sandy to the arms of the small group of people waiting for her in the hallway outside the office.

  Rain drummed on the vinyl awning above the entry doors. The awning was just big enough to cover the four of them as they stood on the wet street. Keefe unfurled the rain jacket he had brought and slipped it around Sandy’s shoulders. “T
hought you might need this,” he said.

  “Thank you, James.” Sandy pulled the jacket closed and looked into the faces around her. The isolation she’d felt earlier—weeping for Edith on the stoop behind her house on Willard Road, bound in the dark rear seat of the patrol car, left alone on the chair beside the deputy’s desk while the action of others whirled around her—that isolation crumbled into dust. “Thank you. Thank you all. And you especially, J.D. I’m so sorry.”

  “Jesus H. Christ, what an unholy clusterfuck of a day, honey.” Margie’s arms reached out and encircled Sandy. Over Margie’s shoulder Sandy could see a faint grimace cross J.D.’s face. He could still be shocked by his wife’s salty tongue. “What are you gonna do now?”

  Sandy shook her head slowly, looked out into the night rain, and pulled the jacket tighter around her. “I just want to go home and go to sleep.” Home. Sandy couldn’t say what the word home conjured in the minds of the three people around her, but she knew with instant certainty that for her it meant the bungalow. “Try to get my head around it all tomorrow.”

  “No answer at the lawyer’s,” Keefe said. “Which is to be expected at this hour, I’d assume. I left a message, but we’ll try to catch him again tomorrow.”

  “Magistrate said it’d be a month or two before the trial date,” J.D. said. “Pretty good bit of time to figure things out.”

  “You go get some rest, sweetie,” Margie said. “I can’t believe this bullshit.”

  “Outrageous,” Keefe muttered.

  “Stink. Was Stink okay?” Sandy looked up at Keefe’s face in the shadow of his hat brim.

  He nodded toward his truck, parked in the lot across the street. The truck sat under one of the mercury vapor lamps lighting the lot, and in the shower of light from the lamp Sandy saw her purple-tongued dog panting in the truck cab.