Dead Simple

by Jon Land

  “I never wanted to settle down.”

  “You never wanted to give up being what I taught you to be. I see you on that dock three weeks ago from a distance, it was like ’69 all over again. From that far away I swear you hadn’t changed.”

  “I’ve changed. You know that now.”

  “Not enough to want that family.”

  “No.”

  “Not enough to want to hang up your guns and live off the world for a time instead of visa-versa.”

  “It’s what I’ve got.”

  “And you come down here looking for me to make sure you could keep it.” Buck went to work on his second beer, flipping off the top with a flick of his thumb as he squeezed the neck of the bottle. “Best thing I coulda done was send you on your way. Maybe told the sheriff not to bring you by in the first place. Shit, I thought about it. Figured I mighta been doing you a service.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  Torrey leaned back against the stilt house. “’Cause I wanted it to be like the old days. ’Cause maybe I figure you’re the one who’s got things right and I oughta be out there with you.”

  “So come with me when I’m ready to leave.”

  Torrey smiled, but he didn’t look happy. “Can’t teach an old dog new tricks, son. You come down here for one purpose, I come down here for another. When I got your note, I was hoping it was from my daughter.”

  “She ever visit?”

  Torrey squeezed his beer bottle. “Never invited her. I haven’t seen her since I popped that general in the face. Busted his jaw, you know. He was drinking his supper through a straw for six weeks.”

  “Well,” Blaine said, “that’s at least one new trick.”

  Blaine stayed awake for a while after Buck went back inside. He moved his shoulder up and down, back and forth. Stood up, grabbed the railing, and put all his weight on his bad leg. There was no pain, not even a throb. He let go of the railing.

  They had started the day after Blaine’s arrival, his khakis swapped for some old fatigues Buck insisted upon that made him hot but kept the bugs from eating him alive. They took the skiff past all the stilt houses, into the shallow muck that made Blaine remember this was the Everglades. The thickness of the vines that seemed to grow out of the water itself varied by the amount of light they got.

  “All right,” Sergeant Major Torrey ordered. “Climb out.”

  Blaine slid out of the skiff without question. The voice was the same one he remembered from a generation before, just a little more rasp to it, born of a thousand cartons of cigarettes. Blaine’s boots touched the bottom only long enough for him to sink in up to his ankles.

  “What now?” Blaine had asked eagerly.

  “What now, sir,” Buck Torrey corrected. “Now I start paddling and you start walking.”

  Blaine tried to budge his feet. “Walking?”

  “You get a bullet in your hip or in your brain? Yeah, walking!”

  Blaine pulled his good foot out first, felt it squishing around beneath him. He hesitated briefly before following with the second, finally gritted his teeth and lifted. His hip felt like someone was rubbing glass against it, but his foot broke free of the muck and sank back down. He stepped out with his good leg next and had repeated the process for ten steps each foot before the temptation to reach out for the skiff’s side got to be almost too much.

  By the twentieth step, it was too much. He went to grab hold of the boat and got an oar cracked against his knuckles for the effort.

  “I say it was time to take a break, son?”

  “No.”

  “No …”

  “No, sir.”

  “Keep walking.”

  Blaine did as he was told. Occasionally he got lucky and the bottom hardened beneath him. But more often it stayed soft. Sometimes it swallowed his knees, taking every bit of strength and energy he had to negotiate his way through it. His bad hip felt numb by the time Sergeant Major Buck Torrey let him lean into the skiff for some water out of an ancient canteen, but it wasn’t dragging any more than his good one.

  “That’s enough,” Torrey had said, and snatched the canteen from his grasp.

  “How far’d we go?”

  “Well, let’s see.” Torrey turned around and gazed back dramatically, pointing his finger. “We left from there and now we’re here. That far enough for you?”

  “Yup.”

  “Good, son, ’cause now we’re gonna walk back.”

  “You mean I’m gonna walk back.”

  Torrey snarled and hurled himself over the skiff’s side.

  “That’s not necessary, sir.”

  “Yeah, old dog, it is, ’cause I want you to tow the skiff back with you this time.”

  It had been a long time since Blaine had taken this much pain willingly, but he liked it. Liked the way his dead-tired legs were dragging, each step feeling like his last, only to give way to the next.

  The mosquitoes came out just after they started back, and Blaine had only his bad arm to keep them off. Torrey trudged along next to him, smiling as McCracken swatted at them, striking mostly air. The sergeant major seemed especially to enjoy when Blaine missed a bug and slapped himself hard instead, and that made Blaine swat even harder.

  “Okay, switch,” Torrey ordered, holding up.

  Blaine figured Buck meant he was going to take the skiff now for a turn and extended the line toward him.

  Torrey’s eyes narrowed. “You fuckin’ crazy, boy?”

  “I thought—”

  “No, you didn’t think none. If you’d’ve thought, you’d know I got me something more important to carry.”

  He reached into the skiff, which was still in Blaine’s hold, and fished a beer from his cooler. Popped the top off the bottle with a trademark flick of his thumb.

  “See. Now, switch!”

  Blaine’s left arm had seemed a foot shorter than the right for months now. The wound from the Monument had healed clean, the doctors insisted, but left what they called adhesions—scars deep inside that were thicker and uglier than the single one that remained on the outside of his shoulder. Stretching them religiously would give him back his mobility, at least that dreaded ninety-five percent. Give it time, they’d said.

  Blaine gave it Buck Torrey instead. The weight of the skiff dragging against the soupy current pushed his shoulder to its limits. He kept the arm crimped to keep the pressure off it at first, then gradually straightened it. The pain had started out bad and didn’t get much better. But Blaine realized it wasn’t a pain he should fear; it was like the throbbing ache that came with overexertion. He wasn’t hurting himself more and began to realize that eventually he wouldn’t hurt at all.

  Buck Torrey walked ahead of him, coaxing him on the whole time. Despite the pain, the exhaustion that had long ago set in, and the bugs that were subletting space in his close-cropped beard, Blaine felt invigorated; even euphoric. The muck beneath him didn’t feel as thick anymore. His feet churned through it like a plow, shoving it from his path. The sweat poured off him into the steamy water; even the snakes moved aside from his determined rush. Torrey set a faster pace, and Blaine resolved not to drop behind, dragged the skiff harder to keep up. His chest ached. His breath heaved.

  He felt wonderful.

  They stopped in almost the very place they had started, where the water level deepened and dropped, just beyond view of the stilt houses in Buck Torrey’s neighborhood. Blaine found himself gasping.

  “Not bad, son,” the sergeant major said, climbing agilely back into the skiff. His forearms looked like slabs of flesh-tinted steel. “Not bad at all.”

  Blaine moved to follow him.

  “The fuck you think you’re doing? I don’t remember saying we were finished.”

  “We’re not finished?”

  “I am, son. Think I’ll rest a mite, take me a snooze. You remember the way home?”

  “I can find it.”

  Buck Torrey stretched out inside the skiff, head resting against the p
added seat. “Well, what are you waiting for?” he said, and tipped the bill of his cap low over his eyes.

  Blaine knotted the line under his arms and around his chest, dragged it till they reached the deep water, and then began swimming forward, with the skiffs dead weight inching along behind him.

  “I’m hungry, boy,” Buck Torrey called to him. “Can’t you go no faster?”

  SEVEN

  The two divers moved silently to the water’s edge. A third man followed them to the softly lapping currents, pushing a cart that held equipment too bulky to carry even the short distance from the staging station slightly up the hill. The divers walked into the lake up to their ankles and then reached back to the cart for the last and most important parts of their gear.

  A gunshot split the night, freezing them even before a bright floodlight caught them in its glare and a voice boomed out from a small motorboat fifty yards away.

  “That’s far enough, fellas,” warned Liz Halprin. “The pool’s closed for the evening.”

  She held the twelve-gauge Mossberg pump comfortably in one hand, aimed at nothing in particular. The floodlight was in the other, aimed straight at the divers. She shifted it slightly when a figure approached the shore from beyond the rise where she’d seen the divers climb into their wet suits. The man held up a hand to shield his eyes from the sudden wash of light, his olive-green suit seeming to shine in its glow.

  Liz lifted a foot casually to the small craft’s gunwale, and it wobbled beneath her. “Plan on taking a swim too, Max?”

  Maxwell Rentz came as close to the water as his five-hundred-dollar Italian loafers would allow, still shielding his eyes. “You’re in no position to tell me I can’t, Ms. Halprin.”

  “No, right now I’m in a position to shoot you dead.”

  “And what would be your reason?”

  “Trespassing.”

  “In my own lake?”

  “I believe, Max, that is the item currently in dispute.”

  “Why don’t we let my divers go down and see if they can find something to help resolve it?”

  “I believe we agreed in court to accept the findings of an impartial underwater survey team.”

  “You agreed. I pointed out I couldn’t afford a three- or four-week delay.”

  “That’s what they make appeals for, Max. And the delay could be plenty longer than that, since it promises to be hard to find any diver from these parts who’ll go down there.” She rotated the floodlight from Rentz to his divers, then back again. “Wait a minute—I’ll bet you didn’t tell them what happened the last time somebody dove this lake, did you, Max?”

  “He wasn’t working for me.”

  “Good thing, or you’d owe him a ton of overtime—since he’s still down there.” In the beam of light, Liz could see Rentz’s two divers look at each other.

  “Rumors,” Rentz said.

  “Not according to his family. I’d make sure your men’s insurance was paid up, if I were you, considering the legend.”

  Maxwell Rentz abandoned the pretext of conciliation and returned to his usual caustic tone. “If you were me, you wouldn’t be planning to build the region’s largest resort on this site, either. But I need this lake your farm just happens to abut.”

  “From where I’m sitting, the farms you’ve swallowed up just happen to abut my lake.”

  Rentz stepped closer, until the currents eddied around the soft leather of his shoes. “Either way, I need your farm to complete my project. And if I can prove you’ve got no claim to this lake, you’ll have no choice but to sell it to me, because I’ll rescind your water rights. That means no irrigation for your fields, Ms. Halprin. My offer’s on the table until my divers tell me I don’t need to be so generous.”

  Rentz nodded at his men, who exchanged a nervous glance before reaching toward the cart again for the last pieces of their equipment. Liz made sure they could see her turn the shotgun on them.

  Rentz glanced up the hill. “Two Preston policemen are right up there watching everything, Ms. Halprin. I believe you’re committing a flagrant firearms violation right now.”

  “Virginia law gives a person the right to defend her home.”

  “And when you prove this lake is part of your home, you can shoot to your heart’s desire. Otherwise, as a federal officer …”

  “Ex—federal officer,” Liz corrected, wanting very much to turn the gun on Rentz and shoot him instead.

  “Forgive me,” Rentz taunted. “You got trigger-happy last month, didn’t you? Cost a schoolteacher his life and cost you a career. I guess you always wanted to be a farmer anyway.”

  Liz cringed, felt her blood overheating. “You finished?”

  “Actually, I’m also told that the incident led to your husband being granted custody of your son pending a hearing. Can you imagine the boy testifying in court about what it felt like when his mother almost shot him in the middle of class?”

  “Too bad he’s not here to see me shoot you.”

  “The police officers have their guns trained on you, Ms. Halprin. My men are going to dive. Let’s see what they find down there.”

  “Or what finds them,” Liz said, just loud enough for the divers to hear. In that moment all the legends of this lake she had heard since she was a little girl flashed through her mind. Her grandpa setting her on his knee and telling her of the ghosts that haunted the water. The ghosts of Yankee soldiers from the Civil War, he said, who died making sure something they were protecting stayed safe forever.

  About those days and the farm Liz had always maintained the fondest of memories. There was plenty of sadness mixed in for good measure, like the time her mother sat her down on the dock and told her that her parents were splitting up.

  Both her grandparents’ wakes had been held on this farm, and it had been after the second one, shortly before Liz graduated college, that her mother broke the news that she was putting the farm up for sale. There was no one to run it anymore, no reason to keep it, and financially it was a losing proposition. Liz had argued against the sale vehemently, passionately, unwilling to let go of the last of her youth and the fading memories of the days when the family had been together. Since it was doubtful they’d so much as break even on the sale, her mother agreed to let Liz pay for the taxes and minimal upkeep. She had done that ever since, never really intending to move back to the farm but wanting the option nonetheless.

  She had finally exercised it three weeks before, in the wake of the Bureau’s response to the gunfight at her son’s elementary school, which had claimed a teacher’s life. Her bullet had been identified as the one that killed him, according to the forensics report leaked the day before her scheduled hearing. After Waco and Ruby Ridge, patience at the Bureau was low and tempers were high. She was given a choice of going through the disciplinary review process and being fired, or avoiding further complications by simply resigning.

  Liz ran the events through her head over and over. What she could have done differently. How much longer she could have waited for the police to arrive. Liz knew, the day she walked out of the Hoover Building after accepting the review board’s offer, that she would never work in law enforcement again. Lost her career and her kid the same day, and as her lawyers grimly informed her, getting Justin back under the circumstances was going to be as tough as regaining her badge.

  So she had driven west out of Washington along Route 66 toward Preston, Virginia, located between Culpeper and Warrenton, where people still lived off the land and lived simply as a result. She needed simplicity now, needed to feel she belonged somewhere. She could make a home here for herself and Justin, once the courts came to their senses. She could rebuild her life on the very foundation where it had been built.

  Liz had returned intending to do most of the touch-up work on the house herself, only to find it and everything else in worse disrepair than she could possibly have imagined. The idea of taking over the site of her strongest, and happiest, childhood memories was so appealing that sh
e failed to consider seriously enough the task she was taking on.

  What, after all, did she know about farming? Her two thousand acres of fields were run-down, the soil was exposed and superheated to a hardened clay instead of being the friable mixture she had spooned her fingers through as a little girl.

  After only three weeks, the dollars spent were adding up, along with the hard work. She’d have to hire a couple of good hands, and that was assuming she could have the place up and running by next season. A task she looked forward to with excitement as well as trepidation, whatever doubts she was experiencing balanced by the security of feeling she was home.

  Then millionaire developer Maxwell Rentz had shown up waving dollars, and she learned of his plans for building the region’s largest resort. Disney had abandoned a similar notion in the area, opening the door for any number of entrepreneurs to capitalize on the same intention. Rentz had seized the opportunity first. He had somehow determined Preston to be the ideal site and had already bought the three farms adjoining hers. But he needed Liz’s farm in order to stretch his visionary resort all the way to the highway, and thought finalizing its purchase was only a formality. It should have been a no-brainer; sell and cut her losses. Actually realize a sizable profit in the deal.

  But Liz couldn’t sell. There was a challenge here for her, and a challenge was what she needed to get rid of the bad taste from her mouth that her lost career at the FBI had left. Beyond that, she was home. No amount of money waved before her would be enough to change that. The more Rentz had increased the pressure, the more she found herself standing firm. She was going to get her son back and raise him here. That thought kept her fighting.

  Maybe she would have weakened in time. Come to her senses about how best to remake her life. But then Rentz had brought in the courts. Bunch of bullshit about water rights and declaring tacit ownership of the twenty-acre lake that formed in the winter of 1863, when Bull Run overflowed and flooded the valley in the midst of a second raging storm in as many days. But whose land precisely had it flooded? Rentz claimed he was going to prove that none which lay beneath the water had ever been hers.