Dark Tiger

by William G. Tapply

  Stonewall Jackson Calhoun and Katherine Balaban were business partners, best friends, and off-and-on lovers. Lately, the loving had been mostly off. Kate had pretty much stopped coming to Calhoun’s cabin for steaks and sleepovers. Even so, there was no doubt that they continued to love each other.

  Walter, Kate’s husband, was the issue. Or, more accurately, the issue was the guilt that both Kate and Calhoun felt about him. Walter knew about their relationship and insisted that he was all for it, but now that his multiple sclerosis had advanced to this new, more ominous stage, they didn’t feel right about enjoying the pleasures their own healthy bodies gave each other.

  It seemed to Calhoun that they were waiting for Walter to die, but he and Kate never talked about it that way.

  She hung her jacket on the peg by the door, unpinned her hair and shook the dampness out, and then came over to the bench where Calhoun was tying flies. She stood behind him, and he could smell the clean, flower-and-rain scent of her hair. She touched the back of his neck and gave his shoulder a quick squeeze. “Nice flies,” she said. “Remind me what they’re called?”

  “These are Dark Edson Tigers, honey,” he said without looking up at her. “Invented by Mr. William Edson, who lived right here in Portland, back in 1929. He invented the Light Tiger, too, but I much prefer the dark version. Dark Tigers imitate smelt. Good on the lakes for both salmon and trout right after the ice goes out.”

  She leaned over Calhoun so that her breast pressed against the back of his shoulder and took one of the Dark Tigers from the batch that he’d tied. “It’s quite pretty,” she said, “but it doesn’t look much like a smelt to me.”

  “What it looks like to you don’t really count,” said Calhoun, “inasmuch as last time I checked, you weren’t a landlocked salmon. Your pectoral fins ain’t the right shape, thank God.”

  Kate laughed softly, put the fly back, then went around and sat on the stool on the other side of the bench from where Calhoun was sitting.

  He looked up at her and caught something in her eyes that suggested it might not be a good time to tell her about Noah Moulton’s visit. “Everything okay, honey?” he said.

  She shook her head. “You want to know the truth, I’m so mad I could spit.”

  “What’s going on?” he said. “What can I do?”

  She gave him a small, unconvincing smile. “It’s not your problem, Stoney.”

  “Walter, huh?”

  Kate shrugged.

  “Don’t tell me it’s not my problem,” he said. “That just hurts my feelings. You and I are way past that. You got a problem, it means I got a problem. That’s what loving each other is all about.”

  She smiled. “That’s not the only thing it’s about.”

  “You better tell me what’s going on with Walter.”

  Kate blew out a breath. “It’s not Walter. Not that he’s exactly getting better. That’s not going to happen.” She shook her head. “It’s his damn insurance, Stoney. Instead of getting my usual update from the doctors and therapists and caregivers this morning, I ended up in a conference room with folks wearing suits and neckties, some of ’em people I never even met before, including the damn COO of the place, a slick fellow named Gibson who runs a whole string of these facilities, got one of those smooth pink faces looks like he sandpapers off his beard and a sly smile that never shows his upper teeth? Anyway, they’re all giving me this double-talk bullshit, and near as I can figure out, they’re trying to tell me that if Walter isn’t showing improvement from the rehab, after a while the insurance for it gets cut off, which is ridiculous, since MS is a progressive disease that nobody gets better from, and everybody’s known that from the beginning. Anyway, if the insurance money dries up, they’re explaining to me, as apparently it’s about to do, it means Walter can’t stay there at this nice facility any longer unless I can pay for it myself. Which I can’t, of course, over five hundred dollars a day.”

  She glared across the fly-tying bench at Calhoun, and he saw the dampness in her eyes. Knowing Kate, he guessed they were tears of anger and frustration, not sadness, and certainly not self-pity.

  “They must have had some suggestions for you,” he said.

  “Oh, sure.” She gave him a big phony smile. “We got options, all right. I could bring Walter home and hire nurses. Or quit my work and stay with him myself. He pretty much needs someone with him round the clock now. Or there are places the government will help you pay for where you can dump a terminal person like Walter for the purpose of letting him get on with dying, if you don’t mind the smell and the dirt and the crappy food and the lack of trained staff, not even to think about what it does to the spirit of the person you call your loved one. Or your own spirit, for that matter.”

  Calhoun wanted to get up and walk around the bench and give Kate a hug, but he could tell that hugs weren’t going to help her right now. “What can I do?” he said.

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “You?” She shook her head. “Nothing, Stoney. There’s not a damn thing you can do. I got another meeting next week to go over my options with some of the people at the place, and meanwhile I thought I’d give Annie Cass a call, see if she’s got any brilliant ideas.” She looked at her wristwatch. “Maybe I can catch her at her desk. I’m gonna try Annie right now, okay?”

  Calhoun shrugged and nodded, and Kate stood up and headed for her office in the back.

  Annie Cass was Kate’s lawyer. Calhoun supposed they should talk with Annie about the termination of the shop’s lease, too. He’d suggest it when he told Kate about Noah Moulton’s visit. He didn’t think this was a good time to dump more bad news on her.

  He hadn’t thought of any other suggestions. He felt a powerful urge to help, to do something to make Kate feel better, to get their problems solved, to get their lives smoothed out, but he didn’t know what to do. Not knowing what to do was always worse than having a plan, even if the plan was dumb and bound to fail—and right now, Calhoun didn’t even have a bad plan. It just felt like he and Kate had been pig-piled by the gods of bad luck on this gray drizzly Tuesday in May.

  A half hour later, Calhoun was at the counter at the front of the shop talking on the phone with the Patagonia sales rep when Kate emerged from her office. She came over, leaned her forearms on the counter, looked Calhoun in the eye, and held up one finger.

  “Hang on, there, Johnny,” Calhoun said to the man on the other end of the phone line. “I gotta put you on hold for just a minute.” He clicked the HOLD button, then put the phone on the counter. “What’s up, honey?” he said to Kate.

  “I’m meeting Annie at the Sea Urchin in fifteen minutes,” she said. “We’re gonna drink some beer.”

  “Annie gonna help you get this thing with Walter straightened out?”

  “I don’t know about that,” said Kate. “Mainly, we’re going to drink beer.” She leaned across the counter and kissed Calhoun on the mouth. “I’ll let you know if Annie comes up with something,” she said.

  He nodded. “Be sure to get some food in your stomach while you’re at it. Try the fish chowder. That’s the Urchin’s specialty.”

  Kate ruffled Calhoun’s hair. “Their specialty, as you know, is their selection of New England microbrews. Annie and I figure on sampling several of them.” She kissed his cheek and headed for the door.

  Calhoun watched her go. He still hadn’t told her about Noah Moulton’s visit and the bad news about the lease on the shop. Kate was preoccupied with her problem with Walter, and the opportunity to talk about the future of their business just hadn’t come up.

  He’d have to do it. He didn’t look forward to it.

  CHAPTER THREE

  By the time Calhoun had locked up the shop and he and Ralph had climbed into his truck to head home to his cabin in the woods, the wind had shifted and the sky had cleared, and suddenly it was a pretty late afternoon in the middle of May. Through the open window, the wet earth smelled fresh and fertile, and in the slanting sunlight, the young leave
s on the maples and poplars and birches washed the hillsides in muted pastel shades of mint and blush and lemon.

  As he drove, Calhoun tried to figure out what to do about the lease on the shop. Noah Moulton hadn’t held out much hope that Mr. Eldon Camby would change his mind about selling the building, and the thought of trying to find a new place and moving all their stuff was close to overwhelming. If that wasn’t bad enough, there was Walter, apparently having his insurance cut off and getting kicked out of his rehab facility, and with no place to go.

  When problems came, Calhoun thought, they came in bunches, and he wasn’t exactly bubbling with inspirational solutions.

  “You got any thoughts?” he said to Ralph, who was riding shotgun with his nose sticking out of the half-open side window.

  Ralph turned to look at Calhoun, and the way his tongue lolled from his mouth, it was pretty clear that as usual, the only significant thoughts the dog was having concerned food.

  Well, maybe Annie Cass would have some useful advice for Kate. Annie was a lawyer. Lawyers never seemed to be at a loss for ideas, such as, when in doubt, sue somebody.

  Calhoun lived in a cabin he’d built himself, with help from his friend Lyle McMahan, in the township of Dublin a little over half an hour’s ride by pickup truck due west of the shop in Portland. They’d erected the place—it was more than a cabin, though less than a house—atop an old cellar hole that the Fire of ’47 had leveled over sixty years earlier. It overlooked a little spring-fed stream named Bitch Creek, where native brook trout lived and reproduced.

  Every time Calhoun pulled into his driveway, it reminded him of Lyle, who had cleared the roadway with a chain saw. Lyle had given Calhoun the Brittany pup he named Ralph, after Ralph Waldo Emerson, too. Lyle, just a kid in his twenties, had ended up murdered, facedown in a trout pond. Stoney Calhoun had found his body and then proceeded to track down his friend’s killer.

  The long dirt driveway wound through the woods and ended in a long gentle slope to the house. Calhoun turned off the road and proceeded no more than twenty feet before he stopped the truck. “Whoa,” he said to Ralph. “Looks like we got company.”

  He turned off the ignition, got out, and squatted down to examine the fresh tire tracks in the wet driveway ruts. Judging by the tread and their depth and the distance between them, they’d been made by an automobile, not a wider, heavier vehicle like a truck. Their edges were sharp, and the dampness they’d squeezed from the compressed earth was pooling in them, which told Calhoun that they’d been made within the past hour or so. There was one set of tracks going in and none coming out. Whoever had driven down to Calhoun’s house was still there.

  Calhoun leaned into his truck, pulled his .30-30 Winchester deer rifle from behind the seat, cranked the lever to jack a cartridge into the chamber, and snapped his fingers at Ralph. “Let’s go,” he said. “You heel.”

  They slid into the woods and eased their way through the underbrush parallel to the driveway, Ralph trotting along behind Calhoun’s left side, until they came to the crest of the slope that looked down on the house. In the open area in front was parked a new-looking Audi sedan.

  Ralph growled in the back of his throat.

  Calhoun touched the dog’s forehead, andhe stopped. “It’s your old buddy,” Calhoun whispered, “come to pay us a visit. Somehow, I ain’t surprised.”

  He stepped into the driveway with the .30-30 tucked under his arm, and he and Ralph strolled down the driveway to the house.

  The Man in the Suit was sitting in one of the wooden Adirondack chairs on the deck sipping from a can of Coke that, Calhoun assumed, he’d helped himself to from the refrigerator inside.

  The Man in the Suit—all the times this man had come to the house to pick Calhoun’s brain, he’d never mentioned his name—lifted his hand. “Welcome home, Stoney,” he called. “Turned out to be a nice day after all, huh?”

  Calhoun climbed up onto the deck and stood directly in front of the man, who was, as usual, wearing a gray suit with a blue-and-red striped necktie. The Man in the Suit had first appeared shortly after Calhoun settled here in Maine after being released from the VA hospital in Virginia. He didn’t trust the Man in the Suit. He didn’t trust the government agency that the Man worked for.

  Well, he’d been told repeatedly that paranoia was a common side effect of getting zapped by lightning, if it was lightning. He did have a big jagged scar on his shoulder and no other explanation for it, but even so, it did occur to him that important secrets might still reside in the inaccessible recesses of his brain—secrets important enough to kill to protect, or at least important enough to obliterate a man’s memory to keep secret.

  The Man in the Suit, who drove an Audi sedan and always wore a suit, kept showing up at unpredictable times to check on what memories Calhoun might have recovered. It was pretty clear that Calhoun had once known important secrets. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that now, if he ever did happen to remember one of them, it would be prudent to pretend he didn’t.

  The Man in the Suit tried to bribe Calhoun with information about his past life. Calhoun pretended he didn’t care about that. He was a lucky man, he said, getting to start over again with a clean slate.

  There were times, though, when Stonewall Jackson Calhoun ached to know something about his parents, or if he’d been married, or, especially, if he had any children.

  Calhoun looked down at the Man in the Suit. “It all makes sense now,” he said. “Why’re you doing these things to us? What the hell do you want?”

  The Man in the Suit cocked his head and smiled. “What’re you talking about, Stoney?”

  Calhoun jacked the cartridge out of the .30-30 onto the deck, picked it up and stuck it in his pocket, and leaned the rifle against the wall. Then he sat in the other Adirondack chair. “Losing the lease on the shop,” he said. “The rehab place saying they’re going to kick Walter out. You didn’t need to do that. You want something out of me, why don’t you just ask?”

  The Man in the Suit lifted his Coke can to his mouth. His throat clenched like a fist. Then he put the can on the table. “Me ask you for a favor?” he said. “You know the answer to that one.”

  “You might’ve tried before bringing all this bad luck into my life,” said Calhoun, “and it ain’t right, making Kate part of it.”

  The Man in the Suit shrugged. “I could’ve asked,” he said, “and you, of course, would’ve told me to go to hell, and if I then proceeded to threaten you, you’d’ve just laughed at me, and so then I’d’ve had to show you that we were serious about needing your help, so time being of the essence here, we figured we’d streamline the process and show you we were serious before asking you.” He gave Calhoun a quick flash of his gray, humorless smile. “So now you know how serious we are about this. You want to lose your shop, and you want Kate’s husband out on the sidewalk in his wheelchair, all you’ve got to do is say no to me.”

  “What if I say yes?” said Calhoun.

  “Mr. Eldon Camby’s buyer changes his mind,” said the Man in the Suit, “and the shop’s lease comes up for renewal. Meanwhile, a vice president in the insurance company’s corporate headquarters in New York overrules the folks in the Maine office, and Walter’s place in that nice rehab facility in Scarborough is secured for the rest of his life.”

  “When?”

  “Just as soon as I’ve got your word, Stoney. Tomorrow. This weekend at the latest. We haven’t got a lot of time. It’s up to you.”

  “I don’t know what you want from me.”

  “No,” said the Man in the Suit, “you don’t, and you’re not getting it from me. I don’t have any details anyway, nor would I be authorized to share them with you if I did. I just need you to agree to do it. I guess you’ve got to trust me. All I can say is that it’s something you’re uniquely suited to do. In fact, there’s nobody else we know of with the combination of skills and knowledge and personality required by this job. Only you. If there were somebody else, I proba
bly wouldn’t be here talking to a hostile man with no memory who doesn’t like me. On the other hand, Stoney, we’ve been taking good care of you all these years because we figured the day would come when you’d want to say thank you, make things even, and I bet you’ve understood that all along.”

  “You saying I owe this to you?” said Calhoun.

  The Man in the Suit nodded. “Absolutely. Well, not me personally. You might say, your country is calling you. It needs you, and here’s your chance to pay back your country for all it’s done for you. It’ll take maybe a month—six weeks at the outside—of your life.”

  “Six weeks away from the shop,” said Calhoun, “right at the height of the fishing season. Our busiest time.”

  “That’s right. Too bad. Can’t be helped.” The Man in the Suit looked hard at Calhoun. “You must not tell Kate—or your friend the sheriff, or anybody else, for that matter—what you’re doing or where you’re going. Not even a hint. You understand that, right?”

  Calhoun shrugged. “So if I agree to do this—before you even tell me what it is—you’ll take care of the lease on the shop and guarantee that Walter will always have a spot in that rehab place?”

  “You’ve got my word on it,” said the Man in the Suit. “Tomorrow. If you agree to do this right now, I’ll see that both matters are resolved tomorrow.”

  Calhoun cocked his head and smiled. “Your word.”

  “I’ve never lied to you, Stoney. I’ve always been absolutely straight with you. You might not like me or what I do, but you’ve got to admit, I’ve always been a man of my word.”

  “I was going to shoot you the first time you trespassed on my property,” Calhoun said. “I still sometimes think it was a mistake not to.”

  “If not me,” said the Man in the Suit, “it just would’ve been somebody else. No matter how deep in the Maine woods you go, we’ll always have you in our sights.”

  “So okay,” said Calhoun. “I obviously got no choice. So I’ll do it, whatever it is. What happens next?”