Bitch Creek

by Tapply, William

Up close, Penny Moulton looked older—thirty, minimum, a few years older than Lyle. She had the beginnings of crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes, as if she’d spent a lot of time squinting into sunrises.

  “I thought of that,” said Calhoun. “And he wasn’t stuck in the mud when I found him. But I can’t figure anything else.”

  “He was with a client, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “The client? Not yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “We can’t find him.”

  She frowned. “I don’t get it. You mean Lyle was fishing with a client, and he drowned, and that client didn’t stick around?”

  “That’s how it looks, miss.”

  “And you don’t find that peculiar?”

  “I find it very peculiar,” he said. “Didn’t you tell me Lyle called you before . . .”

  “Before he died,” she finished. “Yes, he did. Twice, as a matter of fact. Once to tell me he had a guide trip over in this neck of the woods, would I like to make dinner for him when he was done. Which, of course, I said I would, because I could never say no to Lyle McMahan regardless of how long it might’ve been since I’d heard from him. Then he called again a couple hours later when I was at work, just saying he wouldn’t be late, that we could plan to eat around eight and he figured he’d be over in time to have a beer or two beforehand. Lyle was considerate that way. Making sure the food would be ready when he was ready to eat it, you know?”

  Calhoun smiled. “Where was he calling from, did he say?”

  “First time he said he was home. Second time he and his client were dropping off one of the cars and there was a pay phone right there.” She hesitated, gave Calhoun a sad smile, then shook her head. “So Lyle, being all sweet the way he could be, decided to get me to thinking about him. Which, of course, I did.” She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. “I scarcely believe this, Mr. Calhoun. I’ve got to tell you. Lyle McMahan had a lot of girlfriends, I always knew that. I was just one of them, and I might’ve wished I was the only one, but I knew I wasn’t. I could live with that. There aren’t that many sweet, cute guys in this part of the world who are also smart and funny like Lyle. Know what I mean?”

  Calhoun nodded. “Did Lyle mention anything about where he was headed, or anything about his client, when he talked to you?”

  She cleaned her glasses on her shirt. Then she fitted them back on her face and poked them up onto the bridge of her nose with her forefinger. “He sounded pretty enthusiastic,” she said. “I mean, Lyle was an enthusiastic man. He could get all bubbly, start dancing around if he spotted an osprey or a mink or something, and I loved that about him. His client was interested in local history, he said, and you know how Lyle grooved on that stuff. Probably talked the poor man’s ear off. They were setting out on what he liked to call an ex-plore. They were looking for some trout pond that Lyle had never been to, but it was almost as if the fishing wasn’t even important.”

  “How so?” said Calhoun.

  She shrugged. “Just the way he mentioned this client’s interest in history, I guess. Nothing really specific.”

  Calhoun nodded and took a sip of his coffee. “How did you meet Lyle?”

  “A mutual friend introduced us. A lady who knows I like to hunt and fish, said she knew a guy who’d appreciate a woman who could shoot a rifle and cast a fly.” She shook her head. “Funny thing is, we hardly ever went hunting or fishing. The truth is, Lyle loved screwing even more than shooting and fly casting.” She cocked her head and looked at him. “Oh, sorry. Did I shock you, Mr. Calhoun?”

  He shrugged. “A little. Not about Lyle. But you saying it that way.”

  She folded her hands in her lap. “Sorry.”

  “So did you shoot that buck?” He pointed up at the mounted deer head over the fireplace.

  “I sure did. Neck shot from about seventy yards. Dropped him in his tracks. Helluva shot, if I do say so. That was two seasons ago, up near Greenville, which is where I grew up. Lyle and I had that in common. Growing up in the woods around here, prowling around with rods and guns as soon as we could walk.” She blinked away the tears that had welled up in her eyes. “Damn. I did love him, Mr. Calhoun.”

  “So did I.” Calhoun pushed himself up from the sofa. “Well, I just wanted to tell you about it in person. Thought maybe you’d know how I could get ahold of his family.”

  She stood up. “Far as I know, he doesn’t have any. What he told me, his folks both died, and he was an only child. He might have cousins or something, but I don’t know about that.”

  Calhoun nodded and turned for the door. She followed him, and when he opened it she put her hand on his arm. “You don’t really think he just panicked, got stuck in the mud and drowned, do you?”

  “Knowing Lyle, it doesn’t make much sense,” he said. “But that’s sure how it looks.”

  “It doesn’t make any sense at all,” she said.

  She walked barefoot to the truck with him, and when she saw Ralph sitting there on the front seat, she said, “Oh, a Brittany. I love Brittanies. What’s his name?”

  “Ralph Waldo. I call him Ralph.”

  “An independent critter, I bet.”

  “A regular transcendentalist.”

  She poked her hand in through the cracked-open window, and Ralph obligingly licked it.

  Calhoun slid in behind the wheel and rolled his window down. Penny Moulton came around to his side. She reached in and touched his arm. “Thank you,” she said. “It was very kind of you to come talk to me.”

  He nodded. “Sure.” He turned the key in the ignition and she stepped back from the truck. He threw it into reverse, then hesitated. “Ah, Penny?”

  “Yes, Mr. Calhoun?”

  “When Lyle called you? That second time? He was at a pay phone, you said.”

  She nodded.

  “Said it was right there where they were leaving one of their vehicles?”

  “Un-huh.” She frowned. “Yes. That’s right. Why?”

  He shrugged. “Probably nothing. Look—you take care of yourself.” He lifted his hand, then backed out of her driveway.

  As he pulled away, he glanced back. Penny Moulton was standing there in the driveway, hugging herself as if she were cold, although in fact it was coming to the end of a long, hot, muggy June day in Maine.

  Back in the village of Standish, he pulled to the side at the crossroads. A left turn would take him to Portland, where he might drop into the shop and see Kate. He needed to see Kate badly. She was coming over tonight, she’d promised him that. But he wasn’t sure he could wait. The left would also take him to Lyle’s house in South Portland, where he would have to break the news to the housemates sooner or later.

  Straight across the crossroads hooked him onto the road back to Dublin. He wouldn’t mind spending an hour sitting on the slab of granite beside Bitch Creek with Ralph beside him peering at the trout, which should start rising as soon as the sun was off the water. Drink a cold Coke, watch the mayflies, calculate how he might catch those trout if he ever wanted to actually try it, and do some thinking.

  It didn’t make any sense, Penny Moulton had said. She was right. Lyle was too damned resourceful to drown in a little millpond, no matter how peaty the bottom was.

  He shut his eyes and conjured up the picture of the parking lot behind the South Riley Elementary School. He didn’t understand how it worked—hell, there were big chunks of his life he couldn’t remember at all, and most of the rest of it was all blurry—but he’d found that he could re-create mind-pictures of events since the hospital as sharp and detailed as photographs, and he was able to hold them there in his mind’s eye so he could study them. Now he saw each of the cars parked behind the school, remembered their colors and makes and models, the new ones and the older ones, with Lyle’s big old Dodge Power Wagon off to the side, nosed up to the playground. He saw the swing sets and the seesaws and the jungle bars, the earth under the
m worn bare from years of elementary-school sneakers. He saw the back of the school, many of the windows hung with penmanship samples and big colorful fingerpaintings.

  He scanned the vivid mental picture, moving his eyes slowly over the details. He saw no pay phone anywhere.

  He took the right at the crossroads and headed for South Riley.

  The parking lot was almost empty. Lyle’s truck was still there. An old Toyota pickup and a newish Ford Bronco were the only other vehicles. School was out and all the teachers had left for the day.

  He got out and held the door for Ralph, who sauntered over to the Bronco and lifted his leg against the right rear tire.

  Calhoun turned around slowly, comparing the actual place with his mental snapshot of it.

  No pay phone.

  Ralph had wandered over to the swing set, another prime leglifting spot. Calhoun whistled, and Ralph swiveled his head around, shrugged in that I’m-only-obeying-because-I-feel-like-it way of his, and trotted over.

  Calhoun turned back to his truck.

  “You come for that vehicle, mister?”

  He turned and saw Miss Russo, the janitor, standing there with her hands on her hips.

  “No,” he said. “The sheriff will be coming for it. Actually, I was wondering if there’s a pay phone nearby?”

  “You gotta go back to town,” she said, jerking her head in a southerly direction. “Couple miles down the road on the left-hand side, you’ll come to Harry Bogan’s garage. They got one inside, though they’re probably closed by now, come to think of it.”

  “I meant here,” he said. “Maybe inside the school building.”

  “If it’s an emergency, I can let you use the phone in the office.”

  “But no pay phone?”

  “No, but it’s no problem, mister, provided it’s a local call. I can’t let you make a toll call. You understand.”

  He smiled. “That’s all right. Thanks anyway. I guess no one’s come around looking at the Power Wagon, huh?”

  “Just you,” she said.

  “Well, it’ll be gone soon.” He whistled again to Ralph, who was snuffling along the edge of the woods beyond the parking lot. Ralph came trotting over, and Calhoun opened the truck door so he could hop in.

  He turned to Miss Russo. “Thanks again, ma’am,” he said. Then he got in beside Ralph, started up the engine, and headed back to Dublin.

  “Okay,” he said to Ralph as he drove. “Help me out here. If Lyle called Penny Moulton from a pay phone, and if the phone was right there where he was leaving that rented Taurus so he and Mr. Fred Green could take the Power Wagon over the back roads, then if I’m not completely crazy, which is certainly subject to debate, it means they did not leave the Taurus behind the school, since there’s no pay phone there. Which confuses the hell out of me, Ralph, because I can’t figure how Mr. Green managed to get Lyle’s truck behind the school if his Taurus was somewhere else. You see my problem?”

  Ralph just sat there with his nose pressed up to the windshield, offering no help at all.

  CHAPTER

  TWELVE

  AFTER HE GOT HOME, Calhoun fed Ralph and then they went out to sit on the deck. He listened to Bitch Creek burble over the pebbly streambottom and around the rocks. The breeze sighed in the pines. A barred owl hooted from somewhere in the distance as darkness descended.

  He rocked and drank Coke and gazed up at the night sky and thought about Lyle and tried not to think about Kate.

  She’d get there when she got there, and thinking about it wouldn’t bring her there any faster.

  When he checked the time, it was almost midnight.

  If something had come up and she couldn’t make it, she’d call.

  But if something happened to her, nobody would know enough to call him.

  She was right. It was better when he didn’t know she was coming, when she surprised him. He couldn’t worry about her that way.

  Lyle was dead, and it made Calhoun realize that you couldn’t depend on anything. If Lyle could die, anything could happen to anybody.

  He had about decided to go inside and call Walter, find out what time Kate had left, when he saw the flash of headlights bobbing and jiggling down the driveway through the trees. Then he heard the grumble of her busted tailpipe.

  He climbed down off the deck and stood beside his truck, and when the headlights appeared in front of him he stepped aside so she could pull in.

  He went around to the door of her Blazer and opened it. She stepped out, clamped her arms around his neck, and pressed herself against him. She tucked her face into the crook of his neck, and he felt her shuddering. He held her, stroking her back and shoulders, smoothing her hair against the back of her head, touching her face, feeling the tears well up in his own eyes.

  After a minute she stepped away from him and looked into his face. “Please, Stoney,” she said. “I don’t want to talk.

  He knuckled the tears off her cheeks. “Suits me,” he said.

  She tried a smile, touched his face, moved her fingertips over his eyes, his nose, his lips. Then she moved against him again and brushed his mouth with hers. He held her face in both of his hands and kissed her softly.

  They held it for a long moment. Then she broke it off. “Come on,” she whispered, and she took his hand and led him directly to the bedroom.

  The night after they’d talked to Walter five years ago, when they’d asked his permission to become lovers and he gave them his blessing, Calhoun had waited for Kate to come to him. But she didn’t. He’d wanted to talk with her about it the next day at the shop, try to clarify their situation, but her body language told him not to say anything. This is separate, she was saying without words. At the shop, it’s business. We don’t mix the two things.

  She hadn’t come the next night, or the night after that, either. He’d kept expecting her, and she’d kept not showing up and then not saying anything about it at the shop the next day.

  After a few miserable evenings of waiting and anticipating, he’d stopped expecting her.

  Then, close to midnight almost two weeks later, he heard her Blazer pull into the yard. He’d wanted to run outside. But he didn’t. He went over to his comfortable chair, sat down, and opened his anthology on his lap. When she came in, he looked up, said, “Oh, hi, Kate,” marked his place in the book, and put it on the table beside him.

  She’d stood there smiling at him, and he knew by that smile that she knew how he’d been expecting her and then gradually had decided it was better not to expect her, and that she’d intended it that way.

  She went over, sat on his lap, snuggled there with a little satisfied sigh, and he’d held her for the first time ever. He cupped her face in both his hands and moved his fingertips over the planes of her forehead, the curves of her cheekbones, the edges of her ears, the outline of her lips, memorizing her face with his fingers. He traced her eyebrows with the balls of his thumbs as he looked into her eyes. They were solemn, gazing evenly back into his.

  When she tucked her face into the hollow of his throat, he began to move his hands over her body, learning her bones and muscles through her soft cotton dress, running his hand over her hip, up along her side, brushing her breast, down over the back of her leg, then easing up the hem of her dress, stroking the soft secret skin along the back of her knee and over her thigh, and she kept her arms locked tight around his neck.

  Finally she’d lifted her mouth to him, brushed his lips with hers, touched them with the tip of her tongue, and then a little “Oh!” came from deep in her throat and she’d pressed her mouth hard onto his, her butt wiggling in his lap, her arms tight around him, her tongue prodding and probing, her lips and teeth trying to consume him. It was the first time they’d kissed. Calhoun felt as if it was the first time he’d ever been kissed by a woman.

  Then Kate had slipped off his lap. “Come on, Stoney.” She held both hands to him.

  He stood up and let her lead him into the bedroom. They’d undressed each
other slowly, taking their time, laying aside the articles of clothing carefully, seeing each other’s bodies for the first time. When they finally slithered under the covers, they just held onto each other, touching and caressing, not saying much, getting used to the feel of their bodies together.

  When she touched the puckered skin of the scar on the back of his left shoulder, she said, “What’s this?”

  “Long story, honey.”

  “We got all night.”

  He’d rolled onto his back and stared up at the ceiling. “Thing is,” he said slowly, “I don’t know the whole story. That scar is where I got hit by lightning.”

  She was quiet for a moment. “You got hit by lightning?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s so—so random.”

  “Actually,” he said, “it’s not that uncommon. They told me that about a thousand people in the United States get hit by lightning every year.”

  “Do they—I mean, are they all . . . like you?”

  He laughed. “Like me? No, honey. Everybody’s different. Depends on where they get hit, I guess. Some people end up chronically depressed, or have panic attacks. Some are paralyzed or have heart problems. Some lose their short-term memory. Some can’t remember how to spell or multiply. Me, I guess I was lucky. I’ve just got these holes in my memory, can’t hear anything out of my left ear, can’t drink alcohol. That’s why I spent eighteen damn months in a hospital. Because they needed to get my head working right again. It’s still not working that well, as you know.”

  “I like the way it works,” she said. She rolled him onto his side facing away from her, traced with her fingertips the jagged edges of the scar that ran from the top of his shoulder blade halfway down his back. Then she bent to him and touched his scar with her lips and her tongue. “I didn’t know people could get hit by lightning and survive,” she said.

  “Actually, about ninety percent of them don’t die. The guy I was with got me breathing and my heart beating again, carried me off the mountain.”

  “What was it like, Stoney?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember anything about it. Oh, I get these little flashes in my head, especially when I hear thunder or smell the rain, but they come and go so quick I can’t pin them down. I don’t know what I was doing up there on a mountain, and I don’t know who it was that saved my life. I kept asking at the hospital, but either they didn’t know or they wouldn’t tell me. There’s a man out there somewhere, and I owe him, big-time.”