The Upright Man

by Michael Marshall

  “John, why are you being such an asshole?”

  He stood, and dropped ten bucks on the table. “Because it’s going to take more than this to do something about them,” he said.

  He walked away, up the street, and didn’t look back. I watched him until he had disappeared from sight, and then went upstairs to pack.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  IT WAS A LITTLE AFTER SIX AND TOM WAS STANDING on the balcony that ran along the entire front of the two-story, L-shaped motel, when the car pulled into the lot. He was feeling better in most ways, but worse in others. Getting out of the police station had helped. Also changing his clothes. The deputy had been patient about waiting while Tom picked up new jeans and a fleece jacket and everything that went underneath. What else he had owned prior to His Time Away was stowed in the trunk of the rental car, now sitting down in the lot.

  A long hot shower and a sit in the room’s single chair had got him to the point where he more or less felt able to go in search of food. His old clothes were stashed in the bag the new ones had come in. Though it seemed hard to believe they’d be wearable again, he felt a superstitious bond with them. A part of his mind—the part that had kept every wallet he’d ever owned—was prepared to impute power to the inanimate, to believe power lay lodged in things. Without those clothes, who knows what might have happened.

  Though he would not quite have been able to admit it, even to himself, there was another aspect to it. The clothes were his witness. They had been there. They knew what he had seen, or felt. In all the time he’d been struggling through the wilderness, desperate for civilization, Tom had kept one thought in his mind: Not only did he now want to stay alive after all, he had a reason to. He knew something. He was bringing news.

  The experience had not gone quite as he’d hoped.

  He still believed in what he’d seen—or had felt. It was evident that no one else did. The sheriff’s position had been made starkly clear, and the deputy took his cue from him. The fifteen minutes he had spent in the little clothes boutique across from the market had shown Tom that news travelled fast. He’d already guessed this from the fact that the Patrice woman had heard enough to come and drop her drab bombshell (she had spent five minutes afterward apologizing profusely to Tom, which had somehow just made things worse). People quickly knew what he’d said he’d seen. And by the time he was handing over a credit card for his purchases, it had become evident to Tom that everyone now knew—or thought they knew—that he was a crazy person.

  He was shit-faced in Frank’s, you know, couple nights before. Tried to kill himself in the forest, but not with a gun or something hunky like that. Pills, I believe. Passed out, thought he saw something. Then spent two days lost. How funny is that!

  Funny, or sad. The girl behind the register didn’t articulate any of this, but her very, very kind smile said it all. The man behind the motel’s reception desk hadn’t given him much eye contact either, but at the end, again there was a slanted smile. Tom got the message. He was one step away from laughingstock. And two steps away from something far worse. If Connelly said anything about what he’d found out, the kind smiles would stop. And Connelly didn’t know the whole of it.

  He had spent some of the time in the chair staring at the phone, wondering whether he should call home. It had been three, four days. He couldn’t remember whether he’d called the night before His Time Away. He knew this didn’t speak well of his state of mind. He didn’t believe he’d done so, thought he’d wisely denied himself the temptation to say something big or portentous. He felt he owed Sarah a call now, to let her know he was alright, but realized she had no reason to suspect he wouldn’t be. His radio silence would be nothing more than additional evidence for the “Tom is an asshole” school of thought. He wanted to tell her his news. He had to tell someone, and one of his key insights in His Time Away had been that he still cared about Sarah very much. He wouldn’t have to tell her why he was out in the woods in the first place (though she might find out later, so he’d have to leave room for that revelation); he could just say what he’d found. The problem was that, as he stood trying to hang on to the feeling he’d had in the forest, that of being in danger but being worthwhile, his news looked flawed.

  Without it there was no reason to call “home,” and nothing new to say. And what did it amount to, after all? That thing that everyone knows doesn’t really exist? The big silly furry one that always turned out to have been faked? I saw it. I was that close to a mythical beast. It stood over me and I smelled its terrible breath. At least . . . I think I did—while I was drunk out of my mind, and half-asleep, and a retch away from death. And then I saw a footprint. Though maybe I didn’t, and if the truth be told I was hearing voices at the time. That’s my news. P.S. I love you.

  Ought to win her respect right back. She’d probably leap straight down the phone, just to be with him again. My brave explorer. My . . . stupid fucking fool.

  No. What she knew already was bad, but not as bad as what she might someday find out. For them to stand any chance against that, any chance at all, things had to be good from now. She would have to believe his word against that of others. He couldn’t call her now, sounding like a lunatic. Didn’t want to even send her a text message. When he communicated with her again, it had to be the start of an upward track. But no matter how long he stood out on the balcony, he couldn’t work out where one of those might start.

  The car pulled around the lot in a smooth arc and came to rest right in the middle. The driver-side door opened almost immediately and a man got out. He was a little over medium height, had brown hair cut well, and looked like city folk.

  He looked up at the balcony and gave a little wave. “You wouldn’t be Tom Kozelek, by any chance?”

  Tom frowned at him for a moment. “Yes,” he said, eventually. “Who are you?”

  The man grinned. “How about that? Come a long way fast to talk to you, and there you are, just like that.”

  “Okay,” Tom said. “But who are you, exactly?”

  The man pulled a card out of his wallet and held it up. It was too far for Tom to read the words, but the logo looked familiar.

  “I’m someone who wants to hear your story,” he said. “Now—should I come up there, or are you going to let me buy you a beer?”

  AT QUARTER OF SEVEN AL CONNELLY WAS STILL sitting at his desk in the station. There was no real reason to be. Phil had gone off duty but his other deputy, Conrad, was killing time out in the front. Connelly could have been at home, but the truth was there wasn’t a great deal to do there. Still, he was just about to get up and head on out when there was a knock on his door. He looked up to see Melissa Hoffman standing outside.

  “Doctor,” Connelly said. “What can I do for you?”

  “Well,” she said, “it’s nothing really. Just . . . well, I found something out, and I thought I maybe should tell you.”

  He looked toward the machine in the corner and saw it was half full. “You want a coffee?”

  She nodded, sat down diffidently. People always did. No matter how much they wanted to look at ease, all but a few looked as though they wanted to have the cuffs clapped on right away, in case there was some sin they’d forgotten. The few who didn’t look that way were always genuine criminals, who at some deep, deep level just didn’t understand.

  He fixed them both a cup, sat back at the desk, and said nothing.

  “Okay,” she said. “I did something naughty. When I was in here this morning, checking on the mountain guy, on the way out I spotted something in his bag.”

  “What kind of thing?”

  “This,” she said, and put something on Connelly’s desk. He picked it up, turned it over. It looked like a small clump of weeds. Old weeds. “I probably shouldn’t have taken it.”

  “Probably,” he said. “What is it?”

  “That’s just it,” she said. “I saw it there—actually it was one of several in the bag—and I wondered what it was. Here you’ve got a gu
y who’s making outlandish claims we know aren’t true.”

  “That’s all been squared away,” Connelly said comfortably. “Turned out there was a confusion.”

  “Oh,” Melissa said, disappointed. “Then maybe this isn’t news after all. I just thought I should check it out. Didn’t want to find it was some bad stuff he’d got locally, and we were going to have a rash of drug nuts popping up all over.”

  “It was a good thought,” he said. “So . . .”

  “So I have a neighbor who knows about plants and herbs. I took it to her, see if she could tell me what it was.”

  “Would this be Liz Jenkins?”

  Melissa looked very slightly uncomfortable. “Yes.”

  “She understands a lot about herbs, I know. Matter of fact, you get a chance, you might want to find a way of hinting to her she might want to be a bit more discreet about her use of one of them. Her boyfriend, also.”

  “I will,” Melissa said. “And I know about all that, and it’s part of the reason I went to her.”

  “Oh yes?”

  She flushed. “Yes. I thought she’d be able to recognize the kind of thing that people might want to smoke.”

  Connelly smiled. “Whereas you’d be at a complete loss.”

  “Exactly.” Melissa cocked her head and smiled back, thinking not for the first time that Connelly was a better guy, and a little bit more subtle, than most people gave him credit for. “Shall I go on?”

  “I am agog. Did she know what it was?”

  “Actually, it’s two things.” Melissa placed a piece of paper on the desk and smoothed it out so they both could read—or attempt to read—Liz’s baroque handwriting. “If you look closely you can see one stalk has the remains of some tiny flowers on it. I didn’t see them at first. That one is called Scutellaria laterifolia, or scullcap or sometimes Quaker bonnet or hoodwort.”

  She leaned forward to disentangle another of the scraggy strands, which to Connelly looked indistinguishable from the rest. “And this other stuff in among it is Valeriana officinalis, or valerian. Now. Scutellaria grows all over the U.S. and southern Canada. It’s not especially rare. But the interesting thing is Liz said a group called the Eclectics back in the nineteenth century used it as a tranquilizer or sedative, to treat insomnia and nervousness.”

  Connelly nodded. He sensed there was more.

  “And valerian is mentioned by a pre–Civil War herbalist called Thompson. He says the earliest colonists found several Indian tribes using it, and he called it, and Liz showed me the quote, ‘the best nervine known’—by which he meant ‘tranquilizer.’ Complementary therapists use it today for anxiety and headache and, again, insomnia, and Liz claims it’s been favorably tested against Valium.”

  “That’s real interesting,” Connelly said. “Amazing what you can run across out there in the woods.”

  “It is, isn’t it.”

  “So you’re saying this stuff is just local flora, and it got brushed into the guy’s bag as he was stumbling along in the night.”

  “No, Al, I’m not saying that at all. I’m not saying that for three reasons.” She put her coffee down, and counted off on her fingers. “The first is it would be a family-sized coincidence that two known herbal remedies happened to fall into his bag, especially ones that sound perfect for the mental state of the guy at the time. The second is that if you look down at the lower end of the stems there, it looks a little like one of the stalks has been used to bind them all together.”

  “Can’t really see that,” Connelly said. “Could just be the way they were mushed together in his bag.”

  “Okay,” Melissa said, “be that way. But here’s the thing. Scutellaria laterifolia is a perennial. It dies back in the winter.”

  Connelly said nothing.

  “Al, that guy could have dragged his bag from here to Vancouver and none of that stuff is going to end up inside. Which means it was put there deliberately.”

  Connelly looked at her for a long moment, then reached across and picked up the coffeepot again. He raised it at her, but she shook her head. He took his time pouring another cup for himself, quietly wishing he’d gone home just a little earlier.

  “I don’t really see where this is leading,” he said finally. “Okay, so the guy went to an herb doctor recently. What’s the big deal?”

  “Maybe there is none,” Melissa said. “But I don’t see him doing that, getting these kinds of dried remedies and taking them along on an admitted suicide jaunt. Does that make sense to you?”

  “No, I guess it doesn’t.” Connelly could have suggested that the plants were left there from some earlier time or trip, but he’d already noticed that backpacks just like the one Kozelek had were for sale right there in Sheffer. “So where does that leave us, Mrs. Fletcher?”

  Melissa laughed attractively. “Nowhere. Just thought I’d pass it on. We’re having supper over at the Wilsons’ tonight anyhow, so it was on our way. I left Jeff over in Frank’s, and actually, unless I want to lose the Wilsons as friends and dining companions, I should go haul him out of there before he gets into another round.”

  Connelly walked her out to the street and stood watching as she walked the long diagonal across the wet road to Frank’s double-lot spread of warm light and neon, treading carefully to avoid messing up her dinner party shoes. She was a good doctor, and it didn’t matter to him if she and Liz Jenkins spent the occasional private evening not making much sense. Al had enjoyed some nights like that himself, back in the day. She’d more than likely drop the stuff about the plants. Wasn’t really anywhere it could go.

  But he walked back to his office just the same, sat at his desk, and thought awhile.

  TOM AND THE JOURNALIST WERE JUST STARTING ON their second beer in Frank’s when the doctor lady came in to pick up a guy who was presumably her husband. This man had been sitting talking affably with the barman on the other side of the room. She calmly but firmly made him leave his drink on the counter, and led him back to the outside. Tom turned to watch them crossing the lot and saw her laughing hard at something her man had said. Tom had made women laugh sometimes too. Suddenly he missed the sound very much.

  “Anyone you know?” the journalist said.

  Tom shook his head. “Local doctor. The police got her in to look me over.”

  “Cute.”

  “I guess so,” Tom said. “Taken, though.”

  “Everybody’s taken these days, Tom. Including you, judging by the wedding band you got there. Is there anything I need to know about that? About how come you’re up here all on your own?”

  “There was some difficulty back home,” Tom said. “I came out here to clear my head.”

  “Okay. That will do for now.”

  Tom wondered how long it would be before the man decided he had to know more about that, and how he could keep him away from that information. He set his beer down and looked at him. From his neat shirt and suit alone you’d know this was a guy just up from the city, and who maybe wasn’t quite as smart as he thought. As usual, he was smiling. Tom supposed that was a trait that came in handy when getting people to tell you things. The man—whose name was Jim Henrickson—worked for Front Page, whose red and white logo Tom had recognized from twenty yards. Fashion, fame, celebrities—along with Hitler’s Hideout in Antarctica, Aliens Abducted My Paycheck, and Fish Boy Born to Idaho Beauty Queen. And now . . . Suicidal Designer Finds Bigfoot.

  The difference being that Front Page headlines were never actually that bald, and the writers went to some trouble to look like they were proper journalists. Even if some of the stories wandered into the realms of the bizarre, they were soberly written and took an evenhanded approach. Plus it was glossy. The entertainment world took it pretty seriously, and their film and fashion people got invites to all the big parties. It was, as celebrity hack mags went, pretty classy. That made a difference. If Henrickson had been from the Enquirer or World News, Tom would be elsewhere by now. Eating, probably. But the news had to start s
omewhere, and in the last half hour, Tom had gradually started to think that he might have an audience for his announcement after all.

  “You believe me,” he said.

  “Actually, I do.”

  Tom felt exhausted, and strange, and tearful. The man saw this, and gently clapped him on the shoulder. “It’s okay, my friend.”

  “Why?” Tom asked. “Nobody else does.”

  “Main reason is you just don’t seem like a liar, and most of the nonsense I hear is lies rather than mistakes. Second thing is that this is not the first time I’ve been up around here on a story like this. Nine months ago three hunters fifty miles northeast of here, up near Mazama, reported a very similar incident. Something appearing in their camp in the night. A pungent aroma. They heard strange noises too, a kind of quiet wailing. You hear anything like that?”

  “No. But I was . . . very firmly asleep, before I woke.”

  “Right. Well, it freaked them out. These were three big ole boys, been going out in the woods since they were kids, and they came running scared out of their minds.”

  “I don’t remember hearing about that.”

  “Read us every week, do you?”

  “No,” Tom admitted. “In waiting rooms, mainly. Sorry.”

  “Your implication saddens me, Tom. Waiting rooms are an important environment. We get men and women through that pre-dental anxiety, more power to us. No, well, you didn’t hear about the hunters because we didn’t run with it. Hearsay from three beardy guys in plaid may be enough for our competitors, but it’s no use to FP’s sophisticated readership. Our whole angle is that though we’ll cover the weird stuff, we won’t even consider it unless we think we’ve got a case.”

  “Hitler’s Hideout in Antarctica?”

  “What can I tell you?” The man laughed, throwing his hands wide. “It was a strange old rock formation and no mistake. Personally I wouldn’t have run that one, I admit it freely, but I’m just a field grunt. Sold a shitload of copies, that’s for sure. Hitler, the perennial bad boy. We miss him now he’s gone. Anyway, my point is if BF’s going to be found anywhere, it’s going to be up here in the Pacific Northwest. You have literally hundreds of reports over the years, back to a guy called Elekah Walker in the 1800s—and there’s deep background stuff too. All around this part of the U.S. you can find ancient rock carvings of things that look pretty monkeylike, despite the fact that you’ve got no native primates—or so They say.”