Murders Among Dead Trees

by Chute, Robert Chazz

  We dug her deep.

  She's on her way! said Dad.

  I was baffled.

  It's a short trip.

  Just six feet.

  THE DANGEROUS KIND

  As I wrote this novella, I combined two small towns I know to get the right sense of place. My home town in Nova Scotia pretty much emptied out of my generation because there was nothing for us there. It appears to be limping along, but given how many houses stand empty and for sale, the village is a future ghost town. I’m still making new things out of old ghosts. ~ Chazz

  As long as I can remember, I wanted to get away. I grew up in a speck of a town so small men still stop and remove their baseball caps when a funeral procession drives by. Everyone knows each other. They treat that as if it’s a virtue, as if proximity’s friction is warmth. Dad would have helped me escape Poeticule Bay, but the edger at the mill pulled him in by his wedding ring.

  My brother Jason rambled through the eulogy. “I know Dad di’nt ever have so much — most of us have nothing, so that’s alright. But you can feel good knowin’ Darren Kind made do with as little as what God gave him. That’s what a man is.” He talked as if he and Dad were best buds.

  We watched Dad’s coffin sink into the ground beside Mom’s grave. We cried. The people from town — Dad’s people — watched us. As the coffin disappeared, Jason wheeled on me so fast I expected him to swing at me. Instead, he wrapped his arms around me and squeezed. I went stiff.

  His Jim Beam breath mixed with maple syrup from this morning’s pancakes. “Don’t worry. Big brother’s your new boss man.” That morning’s pancake charged up my tight throat but I swallowed and pushed it back down. While Jason shook hands with Dad’s friends, I fled. I got behind the truck before I puked. If they’d seen, they wouldn’t think worse of me, but they’d never shut up about it, either.

  Dad told me once he felt like a spy at the mill. “It’s loud, Joey. Boy, it’s loud. Those friggin’ saws just whine. I nod to the boss. I smile as I pass the other working stiffs.” He cracked open another beer even though he was nodding off, too sleepy to finish his drink but driven to start another. “I cut the wood and nobody bothers me. While they’re all bullshitting over their lunch, I go out in the yard and smell the cedar and pine. All those bullshitters…. They’ll never know.”

  At the funeral they talked about Dad like best friends talk, like they really knew him. “Always a smile,” somebody said. The big ear protectors Dad always wore made that smile possible. Most of the guys from the mill were neither smart nor kind. I couldn’t remember any of them ever coming to the house.

  The father I knew just made do at the mill Monday to Saturday noon, forty-eight weeks a year: two weeks off for fishing in July, two weeks clear for ice fishing over Christmas. His Saturday afternoon smiles were the real thing. He drank Coal Porter through the weekend and fell asleep in front of the TV. The deeper he got into the weekend, the surlier he got. By Sunday night, he'd be barking at Jason and me. I didn’t get mad at Dad like Jason did. I knew Dad wasn’t really mad at us. He was mad at Monday morning.

  Last New Year’s Eve, I told him we should move to the city. I was thinking New York, of course, but any city would do. “I’ve got the house and your mother’s grave to tend,” he said. “And Jason will do better here than with people from away.” Jason worked as an electrician’s assistant but told everyone he was an apprentice.

  We watched the ball drop in Times Square. “Jesus, look at all those people. Imagine being in the middle of all that, huh?” he said.

  “We don’t have to imagine, Dad,” I said.

  He shrugged. “I can see it from right here and not freeze.” He saw my expression. “Imagination is a curse for a fella like me, Joey.” He looked at the beer in his fist and added, just above a whisper, “But you’ll get there someday.”

  In my dream city, no one knows my name. If they ask, I tell them my name is Joe and it sticks. In real life, people nod and a minute later, they call me Joey again. It is as if I died at age eight and will never get older. The roots are too tight in Poeticule Bay. They will not let anything new grow. If you know somebody since they were in diapers, you own them. I still have another two years of school. Poeticule Bay does not have a bookstore. The drugstore has a dusty paperback rack. Summer people buy picture books full of shots of lighthouses and lobster traps at the B&B. A library bus wanders our way a couple of times a month. I dream of working in a Starbucks in a bookstore. My life will start, I’m sure, when I head down the highway. When I finally escape from here, I’m never coming back.

  “We could at least visit New York. It’s like, eight hours!”

  “Let’s not and say we did.” Dad took a swig and eased his recliner back. The greatest city on earth waited less than a day’s drive away. Dad never saw it.

  Dougie Mac, Dad’s boss, told us a settlement was coming. “The insurance company’s stalling. You boys sit tight. The mill will do right by you.”

  Jason had big plans for the money. “We could fix this place up. There’d be enough for a new porch out back and a hot tub. This place could be party central.”

  “And I could clean it!” I say. My teeth hurt from the gritting.

  “Got any girls in your class who wouldn’t mind a little weed and a naked whirl?” he asked. He didn’t look at me when he said it, trying and failing to sound casual and only half-joking.

  Hanging out at home with Jason was no fun so I escaped to school. Everybody looked at me with sad eyes and even a couple of guys I thought were assholes patted me on the back and said they were sorry. Everybody got quiet, like having me around made them picture my father getting pulled into the whirling blades. People always say they are sorry when someone dies which, of course, doesn’t make sense. They didn’t kill him. Staying at the mill even though he hated it killed him. For that, I will always blame him a little. Someday I’ll be around strangers who don’t know what happened and they’ll ask about my father. “Suicide,” I’ll tell them. And maybe it's true. I knew about the blankness behind his smiles.

  Every day after school I headed straight home, washed the dishes, made my bed and Jason’s, too. Jason didn’t like my cooking — I only know how to do spaghetti, hot dogs and stuff that comes in cans — so after a couple of days we switched to TV dinners. He held the remote in his big fist and even took it with him to the bathroom so I couldn’t change the channel from ESPN. He didn’t have to do that. After he took it into the bathroom with him once, I wouldn’t touch it.

  I didn’t ask how much insurance money I’d be due. Dad started at the mill before I was born so the named beneficiaries were my mother and Jason. Mom’s dead. Dad did not have anything besides the insurance money, the house and half the truck. Dad left no will, so Jason would control the money the same way he held onto the remote.

  A couple of weeks after the funeral, Jason lost his job. First, he said, “Laid off” and blamed Obama’s economy. Eventually he admitted the electrician, Ian Drury, fired him.

  “Imagine that,” Jason said. “Firing me with Dad not cold in the ground yet? Should be a statute of moratorium of firin’ a guy who’s just buried his dad.”

  I heard what really happened through Big June Iverson from homeroom as she entertained a circle of my classmates over lunch break. Her father works at the mill and she spread the story, mimicking Dougie Mac’s lisp dead on and everything. June said Dougie Mac caught Jason drunk, burning hot rubber circles into the mill’s parking lot with Drury’s company van. He ran out yelling, “Jason, stop! You’re going to make those tires as bald as me! Stop! Stop!”

  Even I laughed, along with everyone else, as June jumped up and down (her huge breasts thumping up and down, too) as she waved her stovepipe fatty-floppy arms in the air and shouted, “Thtop! Thtop!” My brother peeled out, fishtailed out the front gate and almost lost it to the ditch in the turn down the hill. Dougie called Drury and said he’d call the police (“the poleethe”, June said) if he ever saw Jason drunk driv
ing again in the mill’s lot.

  Jason was home all the time after that.

  By noon each day, Jason washed his worries away. He chugged the first couple of bottles of Porter to rush to the buzz before slowing down for the hard drinking. “I know what I’m doing behind the wheel. The boss man worries too much about how I drive. That’s what he's like.”

  Jason’s best friends since high school, Dick Glass and Rich Robishaw, were a couple of oddjobbers who hung out at the fire hall. “Those boys got a little too much of what the cat licks his ass with,” Dad used to say. “The way they go on, their tongues must hinge in the middle.”

  Dick and Rich told another version of the story which, they thought, cast my brother in better light. The new story was that Jason had marked up the mill parking lot out of grief, pumped the finger at Dougie on the way out and almost rammed into a family van from out of town as he sped through the gate. Jason laughed it all off and his buddies treated him like a hero.

  Big June’s version hadn’t included anything about almost killing out-of-towners and she made it sound like Jason peeled out in a panic instead of defiance. Her version was probably closer to the truth and better told, what with Dougie Mac’s lisping and all. The bit about Jason giving Dougie Mac the finger had the ring of truth to it, though. Whatever happened, there was no end to the speculation and embellishment all over town.

  Not long after that, Jason looked in the fridge and counted beers — six left. He drained the last of the coffee into his mug and waggled the pot at me.

  “I’ll make more in a minute.”

  “It’s always in a minute with you.” He gave me his most tragic, mocking sigh. “I talked to Dougie Mac again about the insurance money. It’s all wait, wait, wait with him, too. And the unemployment check isn’t much more than beer money, you know.”

  “Less beer equals more money,” I suggested.

  Jason glowered at me. I stared at my cereal.

  “You don’t think Dougie could get our check for himself somehow, do you?” he asked. “Like maybe he’s blowing us off while he’s planning a trip to Disney or something? It’s been months since Dad died. If he's stalling us while he's plannin' something for my money, I'll kill him.”

  I noticed he said 'my' money instead of 'ours', but let it pass. Instead, I told him we were getting down to the bottom of the freezer on food. “We’ll be down to ice chips soon.”

  Jason nodded and paced as he sipped the black coffee. He was excited, which made me nervous. “We’re goin’ huntin',” he said finally.

  My head came up. “For Dougie?”

  “No, numbnuts. He says the insurance money is all about red tape and channels and shit. Fine. He wants time to make our payday happen? That’s fine, too. We’ll give him some time, but in the meantime, we gotta eat. Deer meat will fill that freezer. A man doesn’t need a grocery store.”

  “We really don’t have enough from the dole to get some groceries?”

  “Don’t call it the dole.” His eyes were glassy. I knew not to push back when he was like this. Jason had a special knack for twisting my arm up behind my back until I thought my shoulder would pop out of its socket.

  “Deer meat!” he bellowed. “The woods are full of groceries. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

  My brother hadn’t tried the pop socket trick since the funeral so I went along with his hunting idea. I didn’t have a plan then. I had a lot of time to think about what I did before I did it, true. But I wouldn’t exactly call it premeditated, either. My crime is one of opportunity, so don’t go thinking you’re better than me. Don’t jump to that too fast.

  Jason pulled Dad’s old iron sight hunting rifle from the footlocker by the furnace. Using something that belonged to my father seemed wrong even though he wasn’t around to ask permission.

  Jason had tagged along when Dad hunted sometimes but I had refused. Some particularly hot summers, when the water dried up in the backwoods, the deer would come closer to civilization to drink from the stream behind our house. They traveled in little families and, in the field behind us, the tall grass would be matted down where they slept at night. In our backyard the deer stretched their necks to eat from the apple tree. I saw my father shoot a deer out back once. I was on the back step, still as a stone, watching four deer pick apples with their teeth. Dad shot a doe from the upstairs bathroom window. When it was gutted, dressed and decapitated, the doe’s eyes still looked just the same as when she was alive. They were black and wet, looking at me. I wanted nothing to do with killing a deer.

  Instead of saying no to Jason, I told him about my earliest memory: a white goat with little curled horns hangs upside down. Its tongue hangs out, eyes like marbles. I felt the animal’s fur beneath my fingers. My hand came away wet. Then I saw the red slash of gore at the goat’s throat and the blood clinging to my hand. It wouldn't shake off. I cried. Men laughed behind me. No. I think they cackled.

  Jason told me I was remembering a fragment of a day at our grandfather’s farm. It must have happened just before Mom’s first heart attack because she was still strong enough to carry me. I could also remember my mother’s fat, bosomy softness against my cheek as she scooped me up into her arms.

  I watched Jason's fat greasy fingers fumble to load the rifle with old brass shells. The dead goat is an anchor for my memory, but Mom was there, too. In bad moments, I often reach for that feeling of being carried.

  Jason's rictus grin split his face as he hoisted the rifle. “Dad said, ‘God took Mom. The bank took the farm. Then granddad took himself away. Did it with this .30-30. Get your school backpack. Leave the house unlocked. We’ll only be a few hours.”

  I asked Jason if he cleaned the barrel. He shrugged and said he could still smell gun oil so it was probably fine. He slung the rifle into the crook of his elbow and walked off toward the woods. I carried the pack, heavy with Jason’s beer. He didn’t have a hunting license. “Shouldn’t need one when you can get to the woods from your own back step,” he said.

  “Even the weather’s all fucked up,” Jason said. “When Dad was a kid, there was always at least a little snow on the ground by November first for the opening of deer season. We’ll have to look for tracks in the dirt instead of snow.”

  It was as if we had slipped winter’s notice and fall had decided to hold on until the seasons found their proper order. The Indian summer had stretched out so long this year that there were plenty of leaves still clinging to the trees even now. Last week's Halloween was the warmest I had ever known in Poeticule Bay: a few local kids had found our door, but they all wore their masks on top of their heads, their little faces shiny with sweat.

  The weather had only begun to shift this morning. For the first time that autumn, I could see my breath hang in the air when I exhaled. I pretended to smoke, but quickly grew bored of it. I was too old for pretending. Some of the guys and a bunch more girls in my class already smoked real cigarettes. They all would have laughed had they spotted me trailing after my brother, miming drags on a cigarette and blowing plumes of steam.

  The chill cut at my lungs and I hoped the sun would warm us and make the slow uphill climb more pleasant. The forest went quiet as we stepped into the tree line. A minute later, a squirrel rattled an alarm and skittered away as we pushed through a weave of dogwood. The glass bottles clinked as I walked. We hiked to the old logging road where trees close in to bow and touch overhead. Grass filled the middle of the logging road so high, and the ruts cut so deep, the trail looked less like a road and more like two narrow paths running parallel by coincidence. Jason put a finger to his lips. Staying quiet was all Jason knew about hunting. I tried to tread carefully so the bottles wouldn’t knock against each other. When I began to fall behind, my brother looked back, mouthing curses.

  As the rising sun burned off the gray cloud cover, trees cast another forest of tangled shadows on the ground, adding another thickness and plane to the landscape. The pack straps pulled at my shoulders. Despite the sun and
the cold air’s green taste, my footsteps became heavier as we pushed on and up. The sweat trapped under the backpack sucked my shirt to my skin. My breathing became heavier. We walked another half hour past where I thought I was too tired to trudge up the slope. Salt sweat burned my eyes before I ramped up the courage to complain. “We’re going too far, Jason.”

  “Wuss.” He pointed ahead with the rifle barrel. “I was thinking we’d go there.” The clear cut loomed above us, a ragged oval where trees used to be.

  Out west, they would call Hanley’s Mountain a big hill, but this was Maine. Here, every wide spot in the road has a name and we call every ground down hunk of Appalachia a mountain. Sometimes ill-mannered tourists point this out. “They used to be taller than the Rockies,” we say. New Englanders — Mainiacs, I call them — are obsessed with what was. The future is for everyone else, people from Away.

  Poeticule Bay locals complained about the clear cut, of course —“The Scar” some call it, or just “eyesore.” It stood directly behind the town, a mark in the side of Hanley’s Mountain. The storeowners even worried the summer people would bypass the town. They would take one look and motor on in their houseboats and yachts, pushing south to Boston or north to Halifax or Mahone Bay or Lunenburg.

  “Even if you get a deer up at the Scar, how you going to get it back down?”

  Jason shrugged. “It’s downhill. No biggie,” he said. His eyes were glassy so I didn’t argue.

  By noon, the trail angled up so sharply I had to lean forward under my burden, the weight on my toes. “Enough,” I said. “We’ve gone way too far.” I let the pack slip from my shoulders and sat on a small boulder to the side of the trail. I pulled out a Coke and a ham sandwich.

  Jason watched me for a moment, deciding whether this act of insubordination was worth a thumping. I didn’t dare look in his eyes. I’ve heard that about animals, too, how if you look them in the eyes it’s a challenge and they’ll attack. I kept eating, but braced my leg muscles, ready to throw myself into the brambles if he took a swing at me. Jason walked over and stood too close to me, pausing long enough to make me feel the fear. With less than a foot between us, there was no way I could dodge a blow.