A Particular Darkness

by Robert E. Dunn

  Clare looked at me as if I had walked naked into Sunday services.

  But before he could say anything a voice from behind me answered. “You would lose your business.” It was Mike.

  Clare nodded and asked, “Beer?” It wasn’t so much a question as a statement of expectation. I hadn’t realized they knew each other so well.

  “Please,” Mike said as he sat next to me. “Did I interrupt the lesson in conservation?”

  “Not so much as turned it into an economics lesson,” I responded. “You want to fill in the blanks? You know I’m just a cop and, from what I hear, the token loose cannon.”

  “Yep.” He said as Clare handed over a bottle without a glass. “I’ve heard that too.” He looked at Clare and took a drink.

  “Whatever.” I gave Clare a look myself. It said, One of these days, Alice. And I’m pretty sure he understood the subtext to the subtext was, Bang, zoom, to the moon. Out loud I said, “Just tell me about the fish.”

  “It’s all about the fish.” Mike looked at me serious as a girl who missed her first period after prom. “This whole area is about the fish and fishing. You take it away and you lose a quarter of the economy like a stack of dominos from the lake to every business in the region.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I can understand that, but how do you lose the fish? We’re talking about one kind out of several. And—it’s the one most people don’t even know about.”

  “You’re talking about fish. I’m talking about a system. It’s like asking what happens when you take the police out of a city. The city and other people are still there but how long will it work? Or nurses? Or teachers? Mechanics—”

  “Or distillers of fine spirits,” Clare chimed in.

  “Okay it takes a village,” I said. “Thanks Oprah. But we’re still talking about fish.”

  “We’re talking about a healthy eco-system. How many cogs do you need in a clock?”

  I shrugged.

  “If you take a couple out maybe it still works well enough that you’d never know until that one moment you really need to be on time.”

  “Forget I asked,” I told him. “I’m already tired of fish stories.”

  “Too bad,” Mike said. Then he took a drink like it was some kind of dramatic pause. “Because I have one I think you’ll like.”

  “Only if it’s going to get this body off my plate.”

  “It just might.” Mike pulled a paper from his shirt pocket and set it on the bar between us. “The body’s name is Daniel Boone.”

  “You’re kidding me.” I picked up the printout. It was an intake form from the Benton County, Missouri Sheriff’s Department. The booking photo showed a youngish man, probably early twenties. His black hair was cut high and tight. Military. Aside from his hair, the image also showed a split lip and bruised eye. The important thing was nothing in his face. He was shirtless and there on the top of his right shoulder was the Airborne eagle tattoo. Just visible on the left was a smaller tattoo. It mimicked the Army tab that read RANGER. “Daniel William Boone,” I read from the form. “They named him Daniel Boone? Who would do that to a kid?”

  “You’d be surprised.” Mike reached over to tap at the paper. His finger pointed out the box with Daniel Boone’s address. His town of residence was listed as Boonville. “That part of the state is full of Boones and all of them claim relation to the great bear killer. A lot of his family moved to Missouri before the Civil War.”

  “The town was originally called Booneslick because there was a salt lick some of the Boone family used for their cattle,” Clare added. “It’s right next door to Boone County. The family brought slaves and tobacco farming. That whole area was the heart of what they called Little Dixie.”

  “Enough history lessons.” I used the form to point at Mike. “How did you find this? And how did you do it so quickly?”

  “There are only so many arrests for wildlife poaching and even fewer for paddlefish. And I already knew that the town of Warsaw has the highest rate of those arrests in the state. It wasn’t that big a pile to dig through.”

  “Okay,” I conceded. “It helps but it opens up a whole other can of pain in my butt.”

  “I thought you’d be pleased.”

  “I haven’t been pleased in a long time.”

  “Sounds like a personal problem to me.” Mike grinned over his beer at Clare who glared back at him like he’d told a dirty joke to someone’s grandmother. It took Mike a second to remember the whole widow thing. When he did, he pulled the bottle from his lips, spilling an amber trail, and sputtered. “I didn’t mean . . . Oh God, Hurricane . . . I—”

  “At least you didn’t offer to do the job for me.”

  He laughed. It came out half nervous and maybe a quarter amused. I didn’t know what the last little part of it was, but it was a bit too loud and hard-edged. I didn’t say anything. I did keep staring at him while I took another long drink from my tea. It kept him feeling foolish, which was fine with me. I wasn’t quite ready to let him off that hook.

  “Let me see that.” Clare, who had been glaring at Mike since his attempt at being funny, picked up the printout I’d left on the bar.

  “So, uh,” Mike seemed to be having difficulty finding something to say. “How’s uh . . . I mean did you get Damon settled?”

  “You know Damon?”

  “Billy told me you had him in custody. I’ve cited him a few times. Small stuff. Never had the heart to hit him with a big fine.”

  “He’s with my Uncle Orson,” I said and lifted my glass.

  “I know that guy.” Clare flicked the page in his hand.

  I almost choked on the last drops of my tea. “You’re kidding me,” I managed to say, mostly without spraying liquid.

  “He was here a couple of days ago.” Clare pointed to the picture, tracing out imaginary lines around the head. “He had long hair but I’m pretty sure it was him. He came into town with Roscoe.”

  I turned and looked down the row of empty barstools. Reverend Bolin was gone.

  Chapter 4

  Morning crawled through my window amber-eyed and cat-like in its quiet. It needn’t have bothered I wasn’t there. I was in bed but a thousand miles away and almost a decade in the past. My past. Most of the night I had been there, the sweat that stained the sheets a cold echo of the blood I had left in the dirt of Iraq. People who don’t know talk about PTSD in terms of nightmares and soldiers living on the street. In my experience, there are few nightmares, instead there are moments of transport, actual reliving, not dreaming, of terror. My experience tells me also that the ones on the street are simply the peaks of mountains sticking up from under mist. The rest of us are hidden and living in the mist with you. With, but separate.

  There was a time, a time before . . . everything, when I was a normal young woman, a little taller than average but pretty enough even if it’s me saying it. I had long legs and white skin that bloomed with pale freckles in the summer sun. My hair, a dark auburn from fall until spring, burned under clear skies to the color of bright pennies.

  Then I’d gone to war. It was a time when women were not supposed to be in combat but no one told the Taliban or the hundreds of other tribesmen gleefully living in the thirteenth century. There were no lines, and we were fighting people who wore no uniforms. Shia were fighting Sunni. Warlords were battling over villages and trade routes for oil and Afghan opium. Former Red Guards were pitted against Iranian militia insurgents. And all of them were fighting us.

  It turned out that in that stew of loyalties, money alliances, flags, and faiths, all the men could find one thing to agree on—their disdain, if not outright hatred, for women. Even the men in my own unit.

  I’d been dragged out of camp and raped by two superior officers who seemed to feel that any woman who dared demand a place at the table, deserved to be treated like a dog under it. They left me for dead in the blowing brown Iraqi dust. The dirt I stained with my blood and despair even as it blew like airy rivers over a mud wall,
trying to bury me from the sight of men. I’d crept out of the soil of my living grave and stumbled, scared and mute like the monster’s bride, right into the path of an insurgent vehicle.

  I’d been saved—that is my life, the breathing, heart beating, basic functions of my body had been saved—by the appearance of an American patrol. The wide-eyed boy, a-nineteen-year-old, Army medic who patched me up and told me “Everything would be okay,” went on to become Deputy William Blevins—Billy. At least in my mind. A year ago, I’d helped him save a girl and her arm after a car accident. That was when I learned Billy had been a medic in the Army. I still don’t know if he was the medic. He’s never said. And I won’t ask. What I did, rather than asking, was to run a check. What does that say about me? The same thing it says about all former military police and sheriff’s detectives, probably, that we don’t trust well.

  Billy was deployed there at the time.

  It’s his face I remember but remembering is a hard thing that my mind sometimes dresses up in prettier clothing. I believe it was Billy and that was enough for understanding if not for sharing.

  If I had spent my night bleeding into dry ground and watching the birth of the scars that track my body I might have greeted the sun with a sense of liberation. That particular battle, no matter how I sound, and despite the concerns of my therapist, I’d left behind me. It came in blowing dusts of memory that intruded into my day-to-day but, mostly, I lived without it coloring my every thought.

  Still—

  Before the sun had come sneaking on cat feet through my window the world I was living in was that war, years past. So when the light found me, it illuminated the face of Billy over my bloody body. It shone through his head and the fuzz of his cropped hair like a crown of light and peered through his eyes, his kind eyes.

  Billy said, “You’ll be okay. Everything will be all right . . .”

  Then he was gone and I was lying back in my bed. I wasn’t alone. The past year was with me.

  It had been a rough, but wonderful time when I’d met Nelson Solomon. Like a river flow, he tumbled and smoothed the ragged rocks that my brain insisted on chewing daily. When I wanted to drink, he helped me both with his need and his strength. His need because a man as sick as he got at the end requires a lot of care and attention. His strength because he kept his promise to me and fought to the end.

  “Everything will be all right . . .”

  After Billy spoke and after his voice and the grind of Humvee tires echoed in the chambers of my past, Nelson was lying next to me in the wet sheets, incredibly close but not touching. He was temptation and terror. I knew that if I reached for him, if I admitted the loss and the devastation by contact, he would become, a corpse decaying beside me. All my love and all my loss would be experienced again in a momentary rotting of flesh. My bed—my life—was a grave.

  I didn’t move. I didn’t reach to relive my loss and the sun slowly dispelled it.

  Once the ghosts were all gone, and I had the courage and strength to put my legs under me again, I showered and dressed feeling like I was the haunt. The house was Nelson’s. It was a prefab log cabin but about as rustic as an art museum. It was filled with Nelson’s own art that he’d collected from friends I’d never met. In the big living room I paused. It was a large, open space with a glass wall that stuck out like the prow of a ship over the cliff face that dropped a hundred feet to the lake below. I could never walk straight through it, not since Nelson passed. To the side, between the fireplace and kitchen was a spattered drop that defined his workspace. Still standing within it was his easel and his last painting. It was of him and me in two rowboats on greenish-blue water. My boat and I were in the light. Nelson was in shadow. I was close to shore and he was adrift, far from me, out of reach. I hated it. I loved it. But I looked at it every morning when I came out of an empty bedroom and went to my job.

  I called in to dispatch and let them know I was on the clock, but not going directly into the SO. Instead, I logged myself as making a visit to the Starry Night Traveling Salvation Show.

  An early spring morning in the Ozarks can be almost anything. That one was almost everything. To the east was orange rubbing into turquoise and sunlight. To the west was a line of clouds as dark as the night I’d just spent. The border between them clashed and roiled. It curled like a fishhook to the south where it took on the green cast of hail. I didn’t see, but could feel thunder. It was perfect weather.

  The tents were set up on the south side of Lake Taneycomo in an empty pasture that had a clear view of the water. An old bit of property, it had to have been in someone’s family for many years, the ground was too valuable now for anyone to leave agricultural. It was a developer’s dream.

  I drove through the cut-away barbed wire and parked in the trampled grass. It had taken almost half an hour to get through the twisting roads from the cliffs over Branson to the far side of Forsyth. In that time, the fishhook in the clouds had circled around and filled almost all of the sky. Wind was whipping the canvas and harried looking men whose shirtsleeves were already rolled for labor were running about tying the loose ends. I noticed almost all of them had the look of ex-military. There’s no crib sheet for picking them out. But there is something, a discipline in the movement and a distance in the gaze. Part of it’s the hair. A lot of guys get out and let their hair grow as a big screw you to the rules they had to live by while enlisted. These guys were all lean, and hard, and ratty in a way that screamed pissed-off vet to me. Some of my favorite people and some of my least favorite.

  There were a few women around but they were all small and brown. They were Hispanic in a way that said something south of Mexico. They were girls really and they looked scared. I wondered if it was the building storm or the men that had them looking like black-eyed rabbits ready to bolt.

  “Hey!” someone shouted. I looked around and a lanky-looking man was tromping through the grass in my direction. “Hey,” he shouted through the wind again. This time the call followed his pointed finger to a knot of men working to tame a bit of flapping tent.

  That time one of the men looked up.

  “Reverend says to get over there to the north side of the big tent,” the approaching man pointed and shouted again. “Put down another stake for each pole and double-line them.” Then he turned, shifting his pointing finger to me. “You can’t be here.” He was still shouting.

  Once he got close enough I could see he wasn’t a man at all. He was a teenager. The kid was tall and rough edged in a way that gave the impression of a little dog trying to bully the world back. He wore torn jeans and a denim jacket with the sleeves cut off over a flannel shirt. The shirt cuffs were rolled exposing thin arms decorated with homemade tattoos. I guessed seventeen and that was being generous considering his smooth face.

  “Hey!” he called again, waving as though it was possible I didn’t see him.

  I opened my jacket to show the shield on my belt. It was all the shout I needed.

  The tall boy stopped and stared for a moment. I could see the thoughts behind his eyes. People who share an adversarial history with law enforcement always do the same heavy math in their heads when confronted with cops. You can literally see them calculating the odds of being arrested and for what versus those of just being asked uncomfortable questions. Mixed in is always the complex word problem, to run or not. That unaccustomed concentration betrays them and they always end up feeling targeted by cops who have seen those equations worked out a million times before.

  He looked like he wanted to say something then he cocked a leg and moved it back ready to turn and run.

  “I’m looking for Roscoe Bolin,” I told him. “No need to be skittish.”

  “Who’s skittish?” He didn’t come any closer. “The Reverend?”

  “Yes. The Reverend Bolin. Looks like God in a black suit. The one who just said to double-line the tent ties.”

  “Whatcha want with ’em?”

  I walked toward him. My hand still held ba
ck the tail of my jacket showing my badge. That was distraction from the fact of its resting on the end of a metal telescoping baton. He didn’t know where to look, at the badge or my face. He seemed uncomfortable with either choice and decided to look away at where the other men had run behind the big tent.

  “What I want is between him and me. What’s your name?”

  “Why?”

  “Courtesy.”

  “You didn’t tell me your name.”

  “You mama didn’t teach you to introduce yourself to a lady?”

  “You’re a cop.” He said it like he had found some magic loophole in manners.

  “I’m both.”

  He heard the warning in my voice and dropped the smile he was working at. I waited and he got fidgety and confused.

  “What?” The question blurted out seemingly on its own.

  “Your name?” The first bit of distant thunder rumbled in the sky. I wondered if the coincidence of it helped.

  “Dewey.” He said it hard, like the name had been pried from his mouth. After that it was as if he was deflating with words and anger. “You got it? I’m Dewey Boone. Like a man ain’t got a right to walk around without being talked down to and water-boarded. Jack—boot—thugs. And I got rights. Don’t think I don’t know my rights. I got a Fifth Amendment right not to tell you anything. Fifth Amendment and don’t tread on me. There’s the Second Amendment too. I got a right to defend myself.”

  If I didn’t jump in I could see that little tirade building up a head of steam. So I cut him off asking, “Are you related to Daniel Boone?”

  Dewey stopped his rant like he’d had his plug pulled. He didn’t relax though. If anything his body took on an added tension, a rictus of restrained energy like a man holding a charged wire. His eyes kept moving. They looked from my shield to my face to my boots and back up. They couldn’t seem to settle, dancing like the lid on a boiling pot and, when they lifted all the way up, steam escaped. Suspicion.

  I pulled the print of the intake form with the booking photo of Daniel Boone on it from my pocked and unfolded it.