Knife River, page 9
“That’s fine,” I said. “I’ll just go door-to-door and pound on the windows; piss everyone off until I find him.”
“No, no, no,” he said. “C’mon, man. Don’t do that.”
“Well then?” I said, shrugging.
The two cooks shared a conflicted glance before giving in.
“See that two-story place at the far end, where the fountain is? That’s where Ian’s at.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t tell him we told you.”
I described an X-motion across my heart and made for the big cabin at the outlying edge of the lake.
I heard the sound of a guitar being strummed as I stepped up to a pair of hand-hewn double doors, waited for a break in the music, and rapped hard with the ball of my fist. There was a mumble of conversation inside, and the young man I’d seen in the stairwell with Ian appeared in the entry.
He looked at me expressionlessly for a moment, then took a slow, purposeful visual inventory of me from the hat on my head all the way down to my boots. Over his shoulder I could see Ian Swann. He was seated on an upholstered divan near a window that overlooked the blue lake, plucking the steel strings of an acoustic guitar.
“Who are you?” the kid at the door asked me.
“Who are you?” I asked in return.
“Dowd.”
I estimated Dowd to be three or four years Ian’s junior. He was wearing a pair of scuffed Chukka boots, corduroy trousers, and a muslin shirt with Mexican embroidery almost exactly like the one Ian had worn when he’d come out to the Diamond D. The young man exuded an odd energy, both defensive and protective at the same time, but the look in his eyes seemed disconnected, almost vacant, and he spoke with a strange and halting cadence.
“I’m Sheriff Ty Dawson. May I come in?”
“I don’t know,” Dowd replied. Then he shut the door and left me alone on the landing.
A few seconds later, Ian appeared in the younger one’s place. As before, he looked frazzled, and more than a little put out by the interruption. It seemed to take him a few moments to recognize who was waiting for him on his doorstep.
“Got a minute for me, Ian?” I asked.
He shook off the distraction that gripped him, almost as though he was returning from somewhere distant, back into his own body.
“I’m sorry, Sheriff Dawson,” he said. “I’m a little preoccupied.”
“I understand. I won’t take much of your time.”
“Come in,” he said and led the way down a short set of stairs and into a sunken living room with encompassing view of the lake. Cathedral ceilings and a commodious layout made the inside of the place feel even larger than it appeared from outside.
Dowd watched us uneasily from a chair near the glass doors that led out to a patio separating the cabin from the rim of the waterline, a rush of wind out of the east rippling the surface and bowing the long, tapered stems of the rushes.
“This is my brother, Dowd,” Ian said. “He’s also my guitar tech.”
I reached out to shake hands with Dowd, but he shrank from me in a way that put me in mind of a maltreated domestic animal. I took a step backward to give him some extra personal space, let my hand drop to my side.
“If you’re just going to keep talking,” Dowd said to Ian, “I’m gonna go read in my room.”
“Yeah, sure,” Ian said. “I’ll come get you when I’m finished here.”
Dowd stepped past us, uncomfortable and restive to the point of distress. He seemed to study me in his peripheral vision as he passed by, wary of making direct eye contact with me.
He was on his way to the staircase when Ian called out, “Bring me the D-35 when you come back, will you, Dowd?”
“Okay.”
“Oh,” Ian added. “And bring the Guild, too. The Jumbo.”
“The blond one?”
“Yeah, and be sure to check all the strings for me.”
“I always check the strings.”
“I know you do, Dowd,” he said. “I was just—”
Dowd glanced sideways at me, sullen.
“You don’t have to tell me that,” he said, mostly to himself. “I always check the strings.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“He doesn’t have to tell me that,” he muttered, this time to me, as he left the room.
Ian shook his head and moved to the glass doors, opened them, and stepped outside into the freshening breeze. He drew a deep breath and reached into the pocket of his shirt.
“Mind if I smoke?” he asked me.
“It depends.”
“It’s just a Marlboro,” he said and smiled. He fired it with a chrome Zippo this time and leaned against the rail.
“How’s the eye?” I asked him.
“I’ll be fine. Nothing a little extra makeup won’t fix. At least, that’s what Len tells me.”
“I’d like to help you out, Ian.”
He exhaled a cloud of tobacco smoke and watched it tear away on the wind.
“I’ve got bigger fish to fry at the moment,” he said. “I’ve got exactly six days to finish the new album, then film a live concert the week after for ten thousand of my closest friends.”
“You don’t seem excited.”
“Just a little burned out, that’s all.”
He flicked the gray ash from his cigarette, leaned his elbows on the railing, and looked out at the lake, where swallows and blue bottleflies darted among the bayberry that grew wild along the littoral.
“Your brother idolizes you, doesn’t he?” I said.
“I don’t like when people say that.”
“I intended no aspersion.”
“It’s just that I don’t want to be idolized, Sheriff Dawson. It’s not fair, you know. I’m just a guitar player.”
“I think you might’ve become more than that, Ian. Whether you wanted it or not.”
He drew deeply again on his cigarette and seemed to lose himself inside his own head.
“The people in the background are becoming invisible to me. Roadies and techs, production people. I’m not proud of that. That’s not who I am.”
I remained silent as he gathered his words, his expression almost painful to witness.
“It’s just the pressure right now …” he said, more to himself than to me. “The album, the show … props, lights, stagehands, engineers …”
“Producers?”
He laughed, but I detected no humor in it.
“No,” he said. “Definitely not producers. Len Kaanan is not easy to ignore.”
He crushed out his smoke and looked at me, his tone and his countenance sincere.
“It won’t be that long, and we’ll be out of your hair, Sheriff.”
I watched as he looked into the depths of the house through the window, something paternal buried in his expression. As a father, I thought I recognized what I saw there. It was clear that Dowd was incapable of caring for himself.
“Who looks after him when you’re on the road?” I asked.
Ian knew I had seen him looking inside through the glass, knew right away what I was asking.
“I do. My brother takes care of the instruments, keeps fresh strings on them, keeps them tuned up for me during the shows.”
“Looks as though he likes it.”
“He loves it. Dowd loves to come out on the stage and swap out my guitars between songs. Plus, it keeps him close by.”
“You’ve got no other family?”
Ian paused, a man familiar with lines and boundaries, especially the ones you don’t cross.
“It’s just been him and me since I was seventeen,” Ian said after a moment. “Our mother died when we were young, and my father was killed a few years later.”
I considered mentioning what Len Kaanan had said, about Ian’s having taken a risk to be here, but I didn’t. It felt like a bridge too far.
“I’m sorry, Ian,” was all I said.
There was no imagining what he and his brother had lived through in order to arrive at this place in their lives, nor what they saw on the inside of their eyelids as they slept as a result of those experiences.
“Diamonds in the shit stream,” Ian said. It was the first time I had heard him utter a vulgarity.
“I don’t know if I heard you correctly,” I said.
“It’s something my manager used to tell me. ‘You need to keep looking for those diamonds in the shit stream,’ he’d say. Turns out he’s been mostly right so far.”
“It’s a hard way to look at life, son,” I said.
“It’s the only way I know, Sheriff Dawson.”
I had taken enough of his time, and he was clearly struggling with the deadlines he faced. He didn’t want my help with the troubles he’d had—neither the damage to his vehicle, nor the assault on his person—so there was nothing further for me here.
“I’ll let myself out,” I said. “I just wanted to check on you, whether you’d had a change of heart about … things.”
“Your family’s been a bright spot for me,” he said, following me into the living room as I made my own way to the door. “I’ve got something for your daughter,” he added. “If you don’t mind giving it to her for me.”
He withdrew a cassette tape from a drawer in a sideboard and handed it to me. The label read, Krikkit’s Song (Passing Through). He had inscribed it, Love, Ian. xox.
“Wouldn’t you rather give it to Cricket yourself?”
He cast his eyes toward a high window, where dust motes floated weightless on wafer-thin sunlight.
“I don’t know when I’ll see her next,” he said. “With the album, and so little time before the show … They’re keeping me pretty busy.”
“I’ll see that she gets it,” I said.
He showed me a mournful, tired smile, and said, “I wouldn’t trust it with anyone else.”
CHAPTER TEN
JESSE AND CRICKET had already wrapped shooting for the day by the time I stepped out from Ian Swann’s cabin. The studio aspens were casting long shadows of late afternoon, and I climbed into my truck and made the long drive back to the Diamond D.
Jesse was just getting out of the shower as I returned home, drying her hair with a hand towel in front of a mirror that was frosted with steam condensation. I kissed her and asked where our daughter was, and Jesse told me she’d taken a walk down to the old teahouse, told me she’d been acting sullen all day.
The teahouse was the name Cricket had given to a long-disused springhouse I had repurposed for her when she’d been a little girl. It had gone through a number of identities over the years, but teahouse was the one that had endured. It was about the size of a small tractor shed, constructed of pine logs and rough stone, with a roof made of shingles grown over with moss and a single glass window cut into the south-facing side. It straddled a narrow stream we called Leatherwood Creek and had been used for cold storage in the days before refrigeration.
I had been concerned Cricket might be frightened to play there alone when she was a girl, it being a distance from the main house and horse barn, but she had never been anxious or afraid about it, or much of anything else. Instead, she had decorated it in the way that little girls did back in those days, transforming along with her age from princess tea parties to books, toys, and games, and finally to posters of her favorite teen idols. Those things were mostly all gone now; the only keepsakes remaining were a collection of model horses, an antique steamer trunk, and a table and chair.
Wyatt the dog followed me down past the barn and the empty corral where the snubbing post stood. The last of the day’s filtered light streamed through the tree limbs, and up high on the peaks, the timber was still dusted with snow. Wyatt ran ahead of me and found Cricket sitting on the floor in the narrow doorway of the old springhouse, swaying her bare feet back and forth across the watercourse. She whistled at Wyatt when she spotted him shambling along the trail and motioned for him to jump up on her lap. She noticed me following not far behind him a few seconds later and stood to make room for me to come inside.
I handed her one of the two frosted bottles of root beer I’d brought with me, popped the tops with the hilt of my buck knife, while Wyatt curled up on the floor.
“Are we interrupting you?” I asked. “You seem deep in thought.”
“I’m okay.”
She took a long draught from her soda bottle and looked past me, out through the doorway and into the denseness of the forest.
“I saw you today,” I said. “Out at Half Mountain.”
“You did?”
“I needed to have a word with Len Kaanan. And Ian.”
She withdrew from her reverie and looked into my eyes.
“Really? Why?”
“Sheriff stuff,” I said.
My daughter was very adept at silence. Not the brooding, petulant teenage brand of silence we had all learned to use as a wall or a weapon, but rather the contemplative hush of reflection. I respected that quality in her, because I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t.
“Ian gave me something he wanted you to have,” I said.
I dipped into my shirt pocket, withdrew the cassette tape he had given me, and placed it gently in her hand. I watched a mist form in her eyes as she read the label, then caressed it gently in both of her hands.
The little room seemed to grow even smaller; dusty, with opaque billows of ancient cobwebs in the rafters, it smelled the way old stone and timber does when it’s never been completely dried out by the sun. Beneath the floorboards, I could hear Leatherwood purring through the weir.
“I only have a few more days before I have to go back to school,” she said finally.
The sorrow in her voice pained my heart. Of all the misapprehensions of youth, our reluctance to credit the wisdom of our descents is perhaps the most sad and improvident, but I forged ahead anyway.
“Ian’s a grown man, Cricket,” I said.
“He’s twenty-five.”
“It’s not only about your ages. You two live in different worlds.”
Indistinct light flowed through the waves in the window glass, rain-spotted and filmed by decades of weather, a rickety table and a lone child’s ladderback chair arranged beneath the sill. I had built that table and two matching chairs for her when she was five or six years old, but one had been broken when I’d sat in it to join her for imaginary tea.
Cricket took a seat in the unbroken chair, and I sat on the floor with my back to the wall, cross-legged, on top of a musty horse blanket.
“Did Ian ever mention having a history here?” I asked.
“He doesn’t say much about his past.”
“You haven’t asked him about it?”
The evening was growing colder as the last of the daylight seeped out of the sky. A killdeer called out from the depths of the thicket, and the cows and their calves milled and lowed in the distance.
“He keeps a wall around himself,” Cricket said. “He can be very remote sometimes.”
“Ian’s life is on the road, sweetheart. I’m not sure he thinks in terms of family outside of his brother. Hard to maintain any kind of meaningful relationship at all when you’re always on the move.”
“You know about his brother?”
“I met him earlier today.”
She placed her pop bottle on the table with exaggerated care and I saw her cheeks color.
“Why are you talking to me about this, Dad?”
“The worst things anybody ever gave me was excuses. We all have to own our own choices.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I don’t want to see you get hurt, Cricket.”
I could see a storm gathering behind her eyes, and then it passed, a tempest that touched down for a brief moment before it tailed away.
“I’m not stupid, Dad,” she said. “I know who and what Ian is.”
“I’ve never thought you were stupid, kiddo.”
“This is only a job for spring break, that’s all. Ian’s cute, and he’s funny and interesting. He’s just a new friend.”
Cricket’s collection of Breyer horses was displayed on a shelf in the corner of the room; years ago, she had lovingly arranged them by breed and color. She stood now and began to reorganize them, her back to me as I spoke.
“Do me a favor?” I said.
“If I can.”
“You can try to fudge the truth with me, Cricket,” I said. “But you can never allow that kind of indulgence with yourself.”
My daughter kept to her task, and in the near distance, I could hear a loose stone tumbling along the hillside and rolling to a stop in the talus.
“You either bear the ache of self-discipline,” I said, “or you suffer the agony of disappointment. The choice will always be yours.”
“I’ll be okay, Dad.”
She turned when she heard me rise up from my seat on the blanket and get to my feet. Wyatt did, too, stretching and rising up to follow me out.
“You going to be much longer?” I asked. “It’s getting dark.”
“A few more minutes, I think.”
I stepped out the opening and along the short stairway to the creekbank. I could feel Cricket behind me, and I turned to find her watching Wyatt and me from the doorway.
“I love you,” I said.
“I know you do, Dad.”
INTERLUDE II
(1964)
THE HOMECOMING DANCE turned out to be kind of a drag, so Paul and Heather decided to join a bunch of the other kids down by the oxbow, where a party was rumored to have spontaneously arisen. Paul parked his car beside at least a dozen others in the flats behind a coppice of barberry, fernbush, and spruce.
The night had grown cool with the coming of autumn, the air sweet with pine tar and the smell of the river channeling between stones and snags. Heather’s hand felt soft and warm as Paul helped her across a footbridge built from railroad ties spanning a narrow creek, the jangle of laughter growing more distinct as they neared the pulsating fireglow at the end of the path. They navigated between shallow culverts the winter runoff had carved into the soil, and just beyond, they reached a clearing where several dozen other teenagers from school had gathered around a beer keg poorly hidden at the outskirts of the firelight. Some were already laughing too loud, making out in the shadows, or dancing to music that blared from a portable radio someone had wedged into the low branches of a tree.
