by Gerry Boyle
Finally, I reached the upgrade to the right that led to the house. The truck came into the headlights, its hood up. As I passed, I could see that the air cleaner cover was off. Melanie knew the drill.
Lights were on in the house, with the yellow cast of kerosene lamps. I pulled up close to the door and got out and went up the steps. Before I could knock, the door swung open.
“Hey, McMorrow,” Melanie said. “Sorry about this.”
“It’s okay.”
“Come on in. I made you some tea.”
She saw me wince.
“No, it’s the real stuff. I remembered how you were trying to be polite with the Japanese green.”
She turned and I followed. She was wearing jeans and a black sweater with lint on it and old wooden clogs. They clopped on the floor all the way to the kitchen.
“How ’bout something to eat?”
“No, I’ve got to go.”
“You eat at the restaurant?”
“No, just had tea.”
“I made muffins. They’re warm.”
She leaned over and opened the oven door and took out a pan and put it on top of the stove, beside a steaming kettle. Her face was intent as she pried the muffins out of their little holes. They smelled good but I felt a little like Hansel in the witch’s house.
Melanie put the muffins on a tray and went to the refrigerator and got butter. She put it out on the table with a knife and then put out two mugs. One was black and one brown and the black one got the tea bag. Red Rose. Melanie poured from the kettle and steam billowed up. She took a muffin and broke it in half and buttered it and took a big chomp.
“I’ve been eating a lot. Takes my mind off it. Whatever gets you through the night, right?” She shrugged.
“How’s Stephen?”
“Pissed-off, but what else is new.”
“Is he home?”
“Yeah. In the woods someplace. I can’t deal with him right now, so it’s just as well. Where he wants to be, anyway. Here, have a muffin. Beats eating french fries on the turnpike. They’re carrot and raisin. You want milk in your tea?”
I said yes and she turned to the refrigerator. The door was covered with posters and notices, mostly from the marijuana movement. They fluttered when Melanie closed the door.
She put the milk in a small stoneware pitcher and I poured some in my tea. I dipped the tea bag up and down and tossed it in the trash. Melanie poured water through her strainer thing into her mug. I took a muffin, buttered it, and took a bite.
Not bad. A little odd organic taste but not bad. Better than the ketchup at the fair, I thought. I ate some more.
“So what’s the deal, McMorrow?”
“Where’s the stuff?”
“Is this some kind of trade?”
“No, but what you have about Coyote could have a bearing on what I know. It could change it.”
“Fine.” She turned and strode off.
“You want pictures? I got pictures. You want clippings? I got clippings.”
Melanie went up the stairs. I waited. Waited some more. It was ten minutes before she came clopping back down. She was carrying a small metal strongbox. When she set it on the table, I saw that the top was gashed open.
“Where’d you find it?”
“In the floor. Just like this, except it was locked,” Melanie said, flipping up the lid.
“What’d you use?”
“A hatchet.”
She took out a stack of clippings and started tossing them on the table like she was dealing cards.
“Bernard Begosian goes to Walpole State Prison, in 1989. Four years for cocaine trafficking. Bernard Begosian gets married, 1983. Bernard Begosian gets divorced, 1985. Bernard Begosian gets six months for aggravated assault, 1987. Believed to be drug-related.”
I scanned the yellowed clippings. The wedding photo in the Lowell Sun. Coyote had short hair but the same eerie deep-set eyes. Probably scared the photographer.
“You didn’t know any of this?”
“Nothing. I just knew he was an old buddy of Bobby’s. I figured he was running from some kind of jam. When I asked, Bobby said, ‘You don’t want to know.’ Like I really didn’t want to know. So I didn’t ask. He was quiet. Didn’t get in the way, helped out quite a lot. More than Bobby, really.”
Melanie paused to pop the rest of her muffin in her mouth. I took a bite of mine, a swallow of tea. Another couple of bites.
The clips were great; it would raise my story to another level, adding some sort of solution to the mystery. Who is the mysterious Coyote? Bernard Begosian, small-time criminal on the lam. From dealing coke to collecting signatures.
To insurance fraud.
“Okay, McMorrow,” Melanie said, as if reading my mind. “Your end now.”
My end. What did that mean? I found myself turning the word around in my mind, then wondering why I was doing that. She wanted me to tell her what I knew, my end of the deal, the bargain.
“Come on, McMorrow. What’s the deal? Is my husband alive or what?”
Or what? The words hung there, floating, and in the background was a faint hum, like an electrical transformer. I could hear myself breathing, but loudly, like there was a microphone down in there somewhere. I looked at the clippings and the words slipped away from me and there was Coyote’s face, only it was Bernie getting married, and this seemed preposterous, even funny, and I looked up and Melanie was staring at me, and when she opened her mouth to talk I could hear her lips parting, see her tongue, hear the sticky saliva smacking, and I pushed away from the table and turned and I had to get out of there because there was no air.
“No,” Melanie said, and then she said, “Bobby,” and I heard a bang and feet pounding and I had the front door open and I turned and there was Bobby and Coyote behind him, coming at me, blond as albinos.
31
I slammed the door behind me and went down the steps, headed for the truck, but the truck wasn’t there and I was running down the hill to the driveway and the darkness was thick, like black pond water, and my feet were floating in long soaring strides, from rock to rock.
And then I could hear them behind me and I swerved right and bent my head and the branches lashed at me but there was no pain, just noise, and I bent forward, low, and plunged deeper and deeper into the brush and then it opened up and I was still running, in darkness, like I had my eyes closed.
I didn’t stop, didn’t slow, and a branch slammed my forehead and I could feel that one, and wiped my face and felt blood and kept going, now weaving between trees. I couldn’t stop to listen for them, the albinos, so I kept running, downhill because it was easiest, and then the ground was soft and there was grass and then muck and water after that, quickly up to my knees and I had to go out, not back in, because mud would leave tracks, so I had to go deeper and swim because swimming left no tracks, just ripples, and who could see ripples in the dark?
But it never got deep enough to swim, just up to my waist, cold if I could feel it, but I couldn’t, just in a distant sort of way. I waded and there was stuff on the bottom that caught at my boots, branches and maybe snapping turtles, but they’d go into the mud to hibernate, and I found myself stepping carefully because I didn’t want to step on a snapping turtle, not when I was stoned like this.
I was very high, like a whopping THC high, maybe in the tea or in the muffin, and my mouth was dry, and I thought of all this water and I was thirsty, and wasn’t that always the way, but I couldn’t drink this water because it had algae in it and green scum and this was a swamp and there were water snakes and frogs and mosquito larvae. They still would be in here, even though it was September, they hatched even in the Arctic, in those little pools that were frozen at night, so they’d hatch here and I didn’t want them in my mouth.
There were trees in this swamp, dead ones from before this water was here, and the trunks were bare of bark and silver like bones. I waded past them, looking up, and then I waded over behind one and stopped.
&nbs
p; I listened. Heard my heart pounding, oompah, oompah, like a German band, and my rasping lungs, but I had to hear them, Bobby and Coyote, not crispy critters at all, just blond now, both of them, like David Bowie back when, I didn’t know when it was, but it was back a ways, and he had white hair slicked back. David Bowie, I thought. What a thing to think of, but you could see the progression, the thought process that brought it up, but I didn’t have time now to think about that.
In the distance I could hear crunching and then Melanie’s city-tough voice—she’d never lose that accent—carrying across the water, saying, “Did you get him?”
They didn’t answer, but the answer was no, and I almost yelled it out but I caught myself. I was standing behind one of the trees and the water was still around my thighs and when I moved away from the trees, I slipped in up to my chest and for the first time I felt cold.
It wasn’t me, it was somebody else, but I had to get out of the water soon and get warm, build a fire, but I couldn’t because they’d see it. So I kept moving until I came to a bigger tree, a tree skeleton really, probably a spruce, I thought. It was thick with spiny branches and I grabbed hold and hoisted myself out of the water but the dripping sounded like drums and I held my breath until it stopped. And then I climbed, one branch after another, up twenty branches or maybe it was fifteen, and I’d counted the same ones twice as I put my left hand on, then my right. But I didn’t think I’d done that, I thought, though I couldn’t swear on it. Strange thing, to swear on it, like a Bible, but I had to be stoned to be thinking that, and I couldn’t think, I had to just hang on.
I did. Like a porcupine, a treed raccoon. I had a branch for each arm and each leg, a limb for each limb, I thought. I hugged the trunk and felt it against my cheek, rough and scaly. Tree-huggers, they called them. Goddamn treehuggers. I had to be a tree-hugger or I’d fall out and impale myself or hit the water, kaboom, and they’d be sure to hear that one, and I wondered if they had guns yet. They could just shoot shotguns at the splash, fire a few rifle rounds in the general direction.
I hadn’t seen guns, but Coyote right out of Walpole—not right out of, but not that long ago—he had to have guns, and Bobby, he was a dirtbag, too, as it turned out. Melanie, too. Calling for them, and them coming in, and “Is my husband alive?” when he was in the next room or out back or wherever he was, with his dyed blond hair, so different you wouldn’t know him unless you really knew him, but I didn’t really know him, not now, maybe nobody did, except Melanie and Coyote, who was really Bernie Begosian, who got married but it didn’t last long, and I wondered why, pictured Bernie saying, “I do,” and, “Till death do us part.”
I sat there in the tree and somewhere on the shore I could hear branches snapping as they searched. They weren’t like Stephen. Where was Stephen? They moved like elephants, very arrogant, a flaw in a criminal, because criminals have to be realistic in order to outwit the system, but then most criminals don’t, at least not for long, because that’s how you know they’re criminals, because they get caught. Bobby and Coyote hadn’t been that good at it because they hadn’t even outwitted me—at least, not yet. But then I wouldn’t be back by the time I’d told Clair and Roxanne, and they’d be worried, and I really had to get out of here; besides, I was cold.
My teeth had started chattering—first a delicate buzz, like brushes on a snare drum, and then an uncontrollable chatter, like a real drumroll. I wondered if they could hear it, like a partridge drumming on a log, or if it was all inside my head, echoing inside my skull. I rubbed my thighs, my sodden jeans, but I was just cold, and there was a breeze up there in the tree and I could feel it like it was a million tiny needles, and I pulled myself closer to the bone-smooth trunk. The thrashing in the woods was closer and I clamped my hand over my mouth to quiet my teeth.
“He must have gone into the water,” I heard Bobby say.
“Then he’s got to come out. Or freeze to death.”
That was Coyote.
“We’ve got to find him, either way. We’ve got to know.”
“You think he’d be across by now?”
“Shit no. You go across and wait. We’ll wait him out.”
But I couldn’t wait, not with those needles blowing into me and my hands that seemed like somebody else’s. I clenched and unclenched them on the branch, thinking of the brain cells saying to the nerves, contract, and the nerves telling the tendons, pull in, and the muscles saying, yessir, right away sir, contracting, all red bands of raw meat. I closed my eyes and my head was humming from inside and I knew I had to stop thinking like that or I’d be dead and floating someplace, in the swamp, in another world, on the other side, where the souls floated, little paper bags of thoughts, drifting—
“Stop,” I hissed.
I had to stop it. I had to live. I had to get it out of me, streaming out of something in my stomach, the muffin, a lump of sodden muffin feeding my system with THC or LSD or mushrooms or whatever it was that was in me, that Melanie had put in me.
Branch by branch, I lowered myself down, feeling the hard bones under my boots, then the water up my legs, into my crotch like a cold snake. I stood for a minute, feeling myself start to sink into the muck, and then I turned to my left because Bobby was in front of me and Coyote somewhere behind me, I thought. I moved slowly like a big snail, like a swan boat full of little kids tossing popcorn. I glided toward the edge of the swamp in the darkness and the bottom was all branches and sticks and other things and it got shallower and my knees were out and then I was in the mud on my hands and knees.
I had to get it out, what was in there, I had to, so I took a fistful of watery mud, a fistful of stuff I couldn’t see, and I shoved it in my mouth and swallowed. I gagged but that was all, and I took more of the slime and put it in my mouth, all cold and gritty but parts slippery like fish, and I thought of millions of bugs and slugs and baby leeches and dragonfly larvae, with legs and long abdomens, and I thought of them in there and liking it because it was dark and warm and there were places to explore, tubes and spongy organs and flesh to eat and places to attach with pincers and claws and—
I vomited.
Spat the black stuff out. Vomited again. Retched and tried to be quiet but it sounded like my guts were being torn like a sheet. Again, the black goo dripping out onto the ground. I thought I tasted muffin.
But I had to move away from the swamp, if they thought I was out there and they were waiting. I had to get up into the woods where it was dry and maybe I could roll in leaves or something and it would dry me a little so I wouldn’t be so cold, or wrap myself in pine boughs or spruce branches. Hemlock would be softer, but hemlock wasn’t as thick, so I’d have to have two layers maybe.
I gave my face a slap, tried to think straight, down a tunnel, not spinning off in any direction. I moved slowly on my hands and knees into the brush, like a sea turtle coming ashore to lay eggs, through brush that was thick and viny and tangled. After counting a hundred crawls, I stopped and listened.
Nothing. I kept crawling.
There were small trees and the brush thinned and I felt like I was moving deeper into the woods, but which way? I tried to orient myself and wondered why that word came to mean that. Oriental. Orientation. We three kings of Orient are . . .
No.
I snapped out of it and it seemed easier to pull myself back from the tangent. Which way? I’d come into the woods, gone straight away from the road and into the swamp. In the swamp I’d done an about-face and then I’d climbed down and turned . . .
I thought.
Left? So that meant I was going parallel to the driveway, back toward the house, past the house really, and away from the road. I wanted to get to the road. I wanted to get out of here. I wanted to get dry clothes and boots. Dry socks. I really wanted to get dry socks. I really wanted to find my truck and turn the heat on, turn it on full blast and load my rifle and shoot those bastards, all three of them, kaboom, kaboom, kaboom. Maybe not. Maybe just drive home.
What h
ad they done with my truck? I hadn’t heard it start, so they must have just rolled it down the hill. That meant it was up there somewhere. Who had the keys?
I felt the soggy pocket of my canvas jacket.
I had the keys, keys to the puzzle, key of C.
The trees were bigger now, maples and poplars and birches, their white trunks leaning like ghosts, the pale yellow leaves flashing like snowflakes in headlights. I moved in a crouch, stepping like the ground was broken glass.
But where was Melanie? If Bobby was on one side of the swamp and Coyote on the other, where was Melanie? Back home heating up some soup? I thought you boys would be cold. Have a muffin. She’d laced mine, which was why I felt like this, but I felt a little better, could think sort of straight if I really tried, or maybe I just thought I was thinking straight and I wasn’t really, and there were no trees and I had hallucinated the water and the cold, but I didn’t think so because I wasn’t tripping, I was just buzzed, but if I could think that, maybe I really was getting better.
I stopped and listened again. Heard my teeth starting to chatter again, doing their little drum solo. I clenched my jaw to make them stop and they waited a moment and started up again, sneaky little devils. I kept moving.
Up the hill was toward the house, or behind it. I thought I’d cross below the house, see if my truck was somewhere in the woods. If not, I’d go beyond the house and work my way through the woods on the other side of the driveway until I hit the road.
So that’s what I did, staying very low. I bent and dug beneath the leaves for some soil and smeared it on my cheeks and forehead like an Army Ranger, a Navy Seal. Did the Marines have one? Or did the Navy work with Marines? I couldn’t remember. I’d ask Clair. Roxanne. Clair and Roxanne. God, I had to get out of here. I had to go up the elevator in the hospital and down the hall and into that nice warm room. They’d wonder what I’d done to my face, or maybe Clair the Marine would know, just by looking at me.
Semper Fi, he’d say. Semper Fi, I’d say back.
“Cut it out,” I said. “Focus.”
