Knife River, page 19
“How about ‘Bigfoot’?”
“I haven’t gotten all the way through the pile yet, sir, but I’ll keep my eyes open.”
“Good work,” I said.
“One thing you should know, though, Sheriff,” he said. “When I matched up the statements I collected from the crew against the payroll list, there’s five people unaccounted for.”
“I thought the payroll was handled in cash.”
“Yeah, it is, but they still kept a list of who got paid so they wouldn’t accidentally pay somebody twice.”
“Who’s missing?”
Griffin pulled a folder from the bottom of one of the stacks, rifled through the pages until he found what he was looking for.
“Three stage crew, you know, roadies; plus two production guys.”
“These people have names?”
The tired smile he showed me was an admixture of humor and futility.
“Let me read them to you: Fuzzy Sam, Gomer, and—you’ll love this one—Bongwater. Those are the three roadies.”
“Two of those men are among the victims,” I told him. “Both deceased. The one named Gomer is a rail hobo. He’s at the Cayuse.”
Griffin’s eyebrows drifted upward.
“I set him up with a room. I wanted to encourage the man to stick around just in case.”
“In case of what?”
“I don’t know, Sam,” I said. “That’s what ‘just in case’ means.”
“What’s to keep the guy from taking off anyway?”
“He says he wants to see his friends receive a proper burial. That, and a soft bed and hot shower’s an upgrade from the jungle, I suspect. I don’t think he’s going anywhere. At least, not for the next week or so.”
“You trust the guy?”
“Not even a little bit,” I said. “But I believe what he told me.”
Griffin showed me his palms in surrender and went back to the list he’d been reading from.
“Last two names are—here it is—Sasquatch. That’s the same thing as Bigfoot, right? What do you know? And the last one on the list is called Tiger.”
I stepped into the pattern of sunlight that shone in from the fixed window high on the breakroom wall, felt the warmth on my back, and looked over Griffin’s shoulder at the list he held.
“That’s it?” I asked. “Everybody else is accounted for?”
“Except Ian Swann’s brother. He’s not on anybody’s list. But we know where he is, don’t we?”
“Two crewmen missing. What kind of work did they do?”
Griffin thumbed through the loose papers in the file and pulled out a lined yellow sheet that had been torn out of a legal pad and passed it to me. I scanned down the list and found where Griffin had placed stars beside the two names I was seeking.
“Production? That’s it?”
“’Fraid so. These folks weren’t real sticklers about recordkeeping, sir.”
“Do you even know what ‘production’ entails?”
“From what they told me, it could be anything from pulling cables to operating the soundboard or lights or rigging … It’s a broad category.”
“You said ‘lights’?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Like the lights that dropped out of the rigging, that crushed and electrocuted three people?”
“Could be.”
“Shit.”
“What?”
“Nothing,” I said. “For now, finish with those witness statements. Make sure they’re tight.”
“Will do,” he said as I returned the list he’d handed me.
A bouquet of red and peach-colored roses was arranged in an antique glass vase and had been placed on the counter in the coffee room.
“Where’d these come from?” I asked as I was about to leave.
“Ask Jordan,” Griffin said without looking up from his reading.
I picked up the vase and carried it into the main office, waiting until Powell finished his phone call.
“What’s up with the roses?” I asked him.
“Shasta picked them from her garden and brought them over this morning.”
“Cut flowers, pressed shirt and jeans, greeting card with hearts on it sitting on your desk,” I said. “You know the saying: happy wife, happy life. You’re living it firsthand.”
“We ain’t married yet, Cap.”
“In a few weeks you will be, and it’s never too early to gather matrimonial wisdom from those of us in the know. You’re gonna need it. By the way, Powell, that happy wife thing? It’s God’s honest truth, I’m not joking. Write that one down.”
I could see I’d embarrassed him, and he cut his eyes to the vase I was carrying.
“I can get rid of those if you want me to,” Jordan said.
“I like them. In fact, I’ve got a better place for them.” I pushed aside a few stacks of papers and made room for the roses on a long table beneath a pinboard crowded with Magnafaxed copies of police wanted posters and the eight-by-ten photo I’d framed of Meridian’s disgraced County Council chairman, Nolan Brody, who’d been run out of town on a rail. I considered Brody’s arrest and subsequent incarceration to be one of my greatest civic accomplishments so far.
“Draws the eye, don’t you think?” I asked.
“I think I might have a lead on the eagle poacher,” Powell said, eager to change the subject.
“Well done,” I said. “Care to tell me about it?”
“Still too early yet. But I can tell you it grew out of the idea you came up with when you met with Lily Firecloud. Which reminds me … She left you a note.”
“What’s Lily doing all the way down here? When was this?”
“About half an hour before you came in. She said she’d be over at Boyle’s diner for lunch before she heads back to her place. She’s probably still there.”
I read the message she’d written on a piece of notepaper that had the logo of the local hardware store printed across the top. It was written in pencil, essentially repeated what Jordan Powell had already told me, and was signed with a feminine flourish. I checked my watch.
“I’ll be at the diner,” I said and walked out the front door.
THE NOONTIME streets were teeming with visitors and tourists, most of them young and outfitted in clothing that looked like it had last been worn at Woodstock. The morning’s overcast had been mostly burned away, the temperature warming up nicely. Overall, it was becoming a perfect day for the rock concert that should have been.
I threaded my way among the window-shoppers who were milling along the oldest block in Meridian, flip-flops, huarache sandals, and bootheels all snapping and clattering the deeply scarred surface of an elevated wooden sidewalk still embedded with steel rings meant for the tethering of horses. Though the visitors seemed to be enjoying a sunny Saturday, the locals and shopkeepers seemed on edge, something brittle in the atmosphere, an indefinable simmering quality to the outward idyll.
I slipped past the line that had formed outside of Rowan Boyle’s diner with all the civility that I could muster and found Lily Firecloud standing near the front door settling her check at the register. She counted off one or two extra bills from the change she’d been handed, eased her way between the packed tables to deliver the tip to her waitress, leaned in for a whispered remark and a friendly shared smile.
Lily followed me outside onto the sidewalk where we found a patch of shade underneath the overhang. Her long, dark hair was cut square at the ends and fell past her shoulders, as straight as if she had ironed it. She was wearing a goose down vest over a long-sleeved men’s flannel shirt and a silver necklace with an agate pendant that was the color of her eyes.
“Am I allowed to hug you in public?” she joked.
“You can hug me anywhere you’d like,” I said.
“It’s a small town, you know.”
“Not today, it isn’t. Want to take a walk and get out of the crowd?”
“How about the park? I’d like that.”
We crossed the street so we could walk in the sunshine, reaching the park just as the clock tower tolled one o’clock and chimed the Westminster Quarters. The grassy open space was dotted with dozens of couples and groups occupying shared blankets and eating deli sandwiches wrapped in wax paper they’d bought from a shop once operated by a hippie commune. A trio of young men wearing Rastafarian T-shirts, each with hair down to the center of his back, played hacky sack beneath the leafy branches of an ancient ash tree.
“Good god,” Lily said. “These people are everywhere.”
“Do you smell that?”
She tilted her face to the wind, sniffed once, and pursed her lips, stifling a familiar grin.
“I’ll be right back,” I told her.
I left Lily standing beside a stone monument topped by a bronze statue depicting an unidentified pioneer in the throes of some manner of valiant anguish and jogged the short block to the substation. Powell and Griffin were both exactly as I had left them as I pulled the door open and stepped inside.
“Powell,” I said. “Put on your hat and gun belt and go take a stroll through the park for me, will you?”
“Something wrong?”
“Nothing that a little law enforcement visibility can’t fix. Just wander through the park and make eye contact with people and smile.”
“Those tourist kids smoking reefer out there, Cap’n?”
I couldn’t tell if Powell was razzing me or not.
“I don’t care what they do in the privacy of their homes, but I can’t have it on the streets of my town, you read me?”
“I read you, Sheriff.”
“Don’t cause any trouble,” I said. “No need to arrest anybody. Just fly the flag a little, make sure you’re seen, then you can get back to your work.”
I could hear Powell and Griffin muttering something to each other as the door swung shut on its hinges behind me, and the resonance of guitar and flute music grew louder as I returned to the park.
I led Lily to a place I knew that wasn’t likely to have been discovered by the tourists, on the far side of the old church graveyard where many of Meridian’s original founders had been interred. The clapboard church house was long gone, but the ancestors of some of Meridian’s first citizens still rested here, visited less and less frequently with the passage of years. As Lily and I pressed deeper into the park, the tourist crowd thinned out, and we walked slowly beside the cemetery enclosure in deferential silence, the stone grave markers blackened with age, immortelles and flower bouquets mostly dead, the Ball jars that contained them crusted and opaque with algae. I shouldered my way between the branches of a copse of laurel bushes that had all grown together, held them open for Lily Firecloud to follow me, and stepped out onto a secluded promontory overlooking the river.
“This is a picnic spot Jesse and I favor in the summertime,” I said. “It’s quiet here, and I figured you had something on your mind.”
Lily looked at me strangely for a moment, tilted her head to one side, and seemed to mull a thought before she responded.
“You really love her, don’t you?” Lily asked. “Your wife.”
“Jesse,” I answered. “Yes, ma’am, I do. Sometimes she packs a basket with a picnic lunch for the two of us, and I’ll slip out of the office and we’ll share it out here.”
“You always were a one-woman man.”
“That’s a fact,” I said. “Not that you would know. You never went out with me.”
She smiled gently and turned her face to me again, something distant in her almond eyes.
“I’m a keen observer of human behavior,” Lily said. A swollen moment hung between us like warm rain, and her expression, usually so stoic, took on a sorrowful cast. “I keep thinking people will change. I guess I keep clinging to the old days.”
Lily took a seat on a flat stone and gazed down at the swiftly moving river, and I sat on a tree stump beside her.
“Same rodeo, different clowns,” I said. “What’s on your mind, Lily?”
“I had a dream that I should come here to see you. To speak to you.”
“I understand,” I said, though I’m sure she could discern my puzzlement.
“When you came out to talk to me the other day, I wasn’t completely honest with you.”
“Honest about what?”
“You asked me about the fire at the McEvoy place. You asked if I knew anything about the history of the place. I left a few things out.”
“What things?”
Down below us, a McKenzie boat carrying two fishermen floated quietly between the banks. The oarsman dodged a boulder and slid into a slough, then allowed the craft to drift across the flats. The lid of a wicker creel lay open on the deck between the two men, revealing a morning’s catch of walleye and panfish.
“Did you ever think you’d leave here, Tyler?”
“I did leave,” I said. “For a while. I tend to think in terms of ‘before’ and ‘after,’ these days.”
She pulled her eyes away from the McKenzie boat, leaned over, and plucked a dandelion flower from the grass between her feet.
“I do, too,” she said. “But the dividing lines are very different for the two of us, I think.”
“I truly hope so, Lily.”
“I heard about the accident out at the concert last night. That was terrible.”
“Three people died. Ian Swann is still in the hospital and hasn’t regained consciousness. I’ve seen injuries like Ian’s before. In the war. In all honesty, it doesn’t look good.”
“I think I know him,” Lily said and looked at me as though to gauge my reaction to her statement.
“Ian Swann? Millions of people know him, Lily.”
“That’s not what I meant,” she said. “I meant, I think I know him from before.”
INTERLUDE IV
(1964)
“WHAT DO YOU mean, ‘What if it wasn’t an accident?’” Heather said.
She was still seated on the tree swing, but she had stopped swaying beneath the branches, her expression indistinguishable between puzzlement and distress.
“Nothing,” Paul said. “Never mind.”
“No, no, no. Not a chance, Buster Brown. You can’t say something like that and back away.”
Paul cut his eyes across the length of the farm, beyond the house and into the shade beneath the feedlot canopy. His dad was still mucking moss off the retention pond, but Paul could see that his father was keeping a close eye on them, and Paul was beginning to feel pressed to return to his chores.
“It’s just something I think about sometimes,” Paul said. “I was only a kid at the time, probably six years old at the most. What would I know?”
Heather remained motionless on the swing, studying him, her eyes moist with emotion.
“Can I come over there and sit with you?” she asked.
“Sure. I guess.” He would easily endure his father’s wrath to feel her close to him. “Just remember, I warned you I smell like pigs.”
She settled in next to him, not caring that she was sitting in the dirt, not caring that he carried the odors of agrarian living in his clothes and in his pores. She looked at Paul and saw something inside of him—some internal barrier—collapse, and the story he had kept to himself for a teenage lifetime came out in a torrent, coughed up like shards of glass.
PAUL’S MOTHER had been killed in a single-car crash on a disused and deserted county road nearly a decade ago. It had been twilight at the time, that particular evening like so many others: stagnant, unexceptional, and drab, just like her expression when Paul had spied her pinning laundry to the clothesline behind the house. Her car had been moving fast, far too fast, striking a poplar with such force that it sheared off the tree trunk and launched the car over a levee where it landed upside down in the stagnant rainwater runoff of a six-foot-deep agricultural reservoir.
Icy water spilled in through the cracks in the driver’s-side window and flooded through a fist-size void the impact of his mother’s skull had cleaved through the windscreen. Not even the rush of near-freezing green water could rouse her from oblivion; unconscious and profusely bleeding from the wounds she’d sustained, her lungs distended, swelling with murky fluid.
But Paul’s mother had not been driving by herself that night.
The three-year-old boy whom she had belted in to the passenger seat beside her had also been trapped inside the car, ensnared for so long he lost consciousness just as his mother had, actually drowning before being rescued and revived by the inexplicable appearance of another motorist. Thanks to the ministrations of that Samaritan, the little boy survived. But not before he sustained severe oxygen deprivation to his brain, a condition the emergency doctors termed hypoxic-anoxic injury, though the clinical terminology would never disguise the damage that had been inflicted on him.
In the absence of air to breathe, human brain cells begin to die after two or three minutes, the first cells to perish being those which reside in the temporal lobe, where all of life’s memories dwell. In the aftermath of the accident, the little boy spent three days in a coma, and the injury that had already been inflicted on him from his near brush with death left him with severe memory challenges, periodic spasticity, disorientation, and measurable cognitive impairment. The doctors said the child would be lucky if he were ever to attain the intellectual and emotional development of an adolescent.
But the boy had survived, and his mother had not. It was the simple calculus that would come to define Paul’s life, and the lives of his father and young brother, Shane, and would continue to do so for all the days that were to follow.
PAUL AND Heather sat in silence for a long while after Paul had finished his telling of it. Overhead, the redwings and tanagers were settling into the spurs of the old oak, and the atmosphere took on a smell of water that had gone green in a trough.
