Darkness the Color of Snow

by Thomas Cobb

  “When do we get our money?” The thought had come to him unbidden.

  “When he calls me.”

  “Who is he?”

  “You don’t need to know that.”

  “You’ll collect the money and split it up?”

  “Mostly I’ll just collect the money. We all make the money and we’ll all use the money. We’ll have gas, beer, weed, and, yes, ammunition for the next month or so.”

  “But I provided the truck.”

  “We’ll gas it up. Do you know how much you had when you took it?”

  “No,” Ronny said. He had forgotten to check that.

  “Then we won’t gas it up. Everyone is used to having less gas than they thought. They never have more gas. Better to leave it down a little than to fill it up. Trust me on this.”

  “YOU GO CALL on Martin,” Gordy says. “Maybe you’ll luck out. I’ll check out the car.”

  Pete just nods.

  “GOAT LADY” WAS and wasn’t a good description of Pam Garrity. It was what most of the town called her because she lived as far from anyone else as she could with a small herd of goats. She sold milk, cheese, and goat’s-­milk soap in a lot of the stores in the area and at farmer’s markets. She lived by herself, alone with the goats and no one to help her except a distant neighbor woman who delivered her products a ­couple of times a week. Pam was an attractive woman, small and slight, though well-­muscled, and her red hair was glorious.

  Gordy turns down River Rock Road and immediately slows. The road is barely graded, rutted and badly eroded, and it gets worse the farther down it you go. To get to Pam’s place, you have to want to pretty badly.

  Often enough, he had wanted to very badly. They met when he was just a patrolman investigating a call from her that dogs were getting over her fences and attacking the goats. One of her goats had been killed, another badly mauled. She had shot one of the dogs inside the pen. Not much had happened. The dog’s owner was located, allegations were exchanged, then everything just quieted down.

  Except that Gordy continued to come back. He liked her fiery red hair and temper. She was one of those women who looked you in the eye, a look that was demanding. There was not a lot of art to it. He made several trips to her house, and he was sure he was welcome.

  He pulls into her driveway, negotiating the erosion at the side of the road, where it crosses a small ditch. Little has changed. Her house is small, the smallest building on the property, kept up, but plain. She has made no attempt to prettify or gussy it up. It’s the house of someone who lives alone, happy living that way.

  He finds her in the barn, mucking out the milking stalls, still small, though a few pounds heavier. She wears canvas pants, a canvas coat, and muck boots, nearly to her knees. Her red hair, streaked with gray now, spills out from under her John Deere cap.

  “Hello, Pam.”

  She stops shoveling and turns to face him. “Gordy Hawkins. As I live and breathe.” She shifts her weight, stands hip-­shot, and stares him down with the slightest trace of a smile. “You get demoted? They send you out this far?”

  “Sent myself out,” he says. “How are you, Pam?”

  “Good, Gordy. Just me and the goats. It seems to suit me better than me and ­people. How about yourself?”

  “Not so bad. I got a job, no goats.”

  “Two bad decisions there, Gordy.”

  “Probably. Yes. Heard you found a car.”

  “Out there.” She nods vaguely to the northwest. “Don’t know if it’s what you’re looking for, but it might be. Hasn’t been there very long. Come on. I’ll show you.” She looks at his shoes. “That the best you got for shoes?”

  “Do I need boots?”

  “Not if you’re willing to ruin your shoes. There’s a lot of wet out there. Not all of it’s frozen. Got some muck boots if you want them.”

  “It’s all right. Probably need new shoes anyway. Let’s take a look.”

  They move around the barn, past the goat pens. The goats run over at the first sight of them, doing little dances of anticipation. He finds goats creepy. He isn’t crazy about herbivores in general, just because of what he perceives as their lack of intelligence. But goats have those eyes. Devil eyes.

  “I was sorry to hear about Bonita, Gordy. I truly am sorry.” She stops and turns to face him. Her face is starting to line quite a bit, but she’s a good-­looking woman. It’s strange how a woman with mud and goatshit on her face can still be an attractive woman.

  “Thanks, Pam. We all have our struggles. All of us.”

  Pam nods, turns, and walks through the pens, toward a small path into the woods.

  The ground seems solid enough for a few steps, then a pile of leaves gives way under his foot, which gets sucked into the mud.

  “You can go back and get those boots. We’re still a ­couple of weeks from a real solid freeze on the ground.”

  He shrugs. “I’ve made my choice, Pam. I’ll live with it.”

  “We all do, eventually. One choice doesn’t necessarily mean you’re stuck with it for life, though. Hate to see you ruin a good pair of shoes.”

  “So, I’ll look like a working cop instead of a desk-­sitting cop. Go ahead on.”

  The car sits amid a copse of birches, a white Lexus, old, already going to rust. He guesses it’s early nineties, ’92 or ’93. The plates and inspection sticker have been removed.

  “Don’t know how it got here,” Pam says. “Pretty sure it wasn’t here last week, though I don’t know if I was out this way last week. Anyway, it hasn’t been here long.”

  Gordy looks at the front end. The right front headlight is broken and the bezel smashed. The right front fender is crumpled and turned toward the grille, which is badly bent, the bumper cover heavily dented. He looks for traces of blood. There’s rust and, maybe, some blood. “How did it get here?”

  Pam points to the northwest. “There’s an old logging road that goes out to Rattail Road. Mostly overgrown, but kids still use it.” She runs her boot through the leaves and sticks on the ground, uncovering flattened beer cans and rotted condoms. “The usual kid stuff—­beer cans, cigarette packs, empty bottles of shitty alcohol, used party hats. Pretty much all over the place.”

  Gordy walks behind the car and back along the path it must have taken to get here. He feels frozen wheel ruts under his shoes. “That would be it, I think. I’m going to call the state police to come in here and take a look at this. They need to go over the car for evidence and rummage around for any ID that might have been left behind. It’s hard to say, but I’d put money on this for our car.”

  “State police, huh?”

  “Yeah. Hope you don’t mind a bunch of cops out back here.”

  It’s clear that she does mind. “That’s a horrible thing, to just hit someone and drive off. Send them out. I’ll bring them back here. Have them call first. Cops usually don’t do that.”

  “Yeah. Sorry. I was anxious to get here and see this. I got an officer who’s pretty busted up over this. I’d like to clear this as fast as I can.”

  She pushes the John Deere cap back on her head. More of the red hair spills onto her face, and she brushes it back behind her ears. “You seen enough of this?”

  “Yeah. I think we have what we’re looking for here.”

  Pam turns and heads back toward the house. Gordy follows. He tries not to notice, but she’s still trim in the legs and backside. Pretty good for a woman close to sixty.

  “You want some tea or something? I don’t keep coffee.”

  “I better not.” He starts to explain, then just leaves it. “I ought to get back to work.”

  “You’re welcome to come in.”

  “Reports and stuff. Got to call the Staties.”

  She turns and faces him. “Do what you need to do.”

  “I really appreciate this,
Pam. Thanks for calling it in.” He isn’t sure what to do. He starts to stick out his hand to shake, then drops it. He wants to hug her, but that isn’t right, either. He’s standing close enough to her that he can smell her, even in the cold air. It’s a good smell altogether, sweat and dirt, maybe a whiff of goat here and there. She doesn’t back off.

  “You’re welcome. I mean, you’re welcome to come in. If not now, another time. I mean, situations being what they are and all. You’re welcome here. You know the way.”

  He reaches out and touches her shoulder, and that draws her in, though he isn’t sure that’s what he wants. She puts her arms around his waist, and he puts his arms around her shoulders. They stand like that for a few seconds, unsure of the next step, if there is a next step.

  “I do know the way.” He drops his arms from around her and steps back, breaking free of her grasp.

  She nods, turns, and walks back toward the house.

  “Pam. Thanks again.”

  She waves her hand without turning around and goes on.

  HE SETS OFF back down the trail he had just walked and comes back to the car. He looks inside. Pretty clean. No doubt the VIN numbers are gone. He looks at the broken brush behind it, pushing some aside and walking what he assumes is the path of the car. It’s harder going than he thought it would be. Because of the semi-­frozen ground there are no tracks. Only the broken brush shows the path the car traveled. He keeps walking, looking ahead of him for more signs that the car came this way. He feels it first with his feet, as his left foot slips and then his right. There was a hump here that indicates the tracks of trucks and wagons. It’s now just a matter of walking out. The nervousness about finding the old logging road gives over to the question of whether this is the car they want or not. If it is, will it exonerate Ronny?

  But there’s more troubling him. Even though they live in the same small town, it has been years since he has seen Pam, and even more years since he has talked to her. And it has all come rushing back, not just the memory of their time together, but the jumble of feelings he’s always had trouble sorting out.

  His time with Pam had been full of turmoil. He was drinking a lot, and trying to convince himself that he wasn’t. He had moved to Lydell a few years before, taking the job of patrolman after his job in Salem had dead-­ended. The small, fiery goat woman had caught his attention early on, first as a novelty, then as a woman who seemed to be everything Bonita wasn’t.

  Pam was fiercely independent, living deep in the woods with her goats, selling their milk and cheese at the local stores, surviving, but not much more, yet happy and proud that she was surviving. She seemed to him a hippie holdover, an exotic creature from an exotic time. She was an artifact from a time of powerful emotions, many of them sexual.

  And Pam was unabashedly sexual. He had been investigating the ownership of dogs that were attacking Pam’s goats. It was exactly the kind of odd thing that had pulled him to small-­town police work. He had not even realized the depth of his attraction to her much beyond the simple acknowledgment that she was a good-­looking woman, despite the smell of goat and stale sweat that seemed always on her.

  And then he reported a settlement offer from the dogs’ owners, who seemed to have no real interest in restraining their animals until he explained that he had the authority to have them picked up and, after a hearing, put down. He found himself looking at her for a response to their offer to restrain the dogs and pay damages, and then seamlessly moving in to her for a kiss that would jumble his new life in Lydell.

  They had been lovers for several months, if lovers was the correct word for it. Pam seemed entirely accommodating, receptive to him whenever he made his way back to River Rock Road to her little farm. He was thrilled by her openness and aggressiveness, her desire that seemed unalloyed. She wanted sex and took it. There was no talk of love, no need of it. He had been tempted many times to tell her he loved her, but didn’t for fear that she would dismiss him from what seemed a perfect relationship. He was fascinated with her body, smaller than Bonita’s but densely packed with muscle. So packed that at the peak of passion, her ferocity brought him close to fear that she would hurt him, despite their differences in size.

  They went on for weeks into months of sex and drinking and talking that went so far beyond the mundane chatter he shared with Bonita, he found himself falling more and more deeply in love with her, and when he realized it would never be reciprocated, he grew resentful. He had begun to think how he might leave Bonita and begin a new life with Pam, and then had to deal with the realization that he was living with a fantasy. Pam had no real interest in a life with him, and he felt betrayed in a way he never thought possible.

  The irony of their reversal of the conventional didn’t escape him. The thrill of protecting, even possessing in courtship, turned against him as he became the vulnerable one, kept. When, on rare occasion, he made love to both Pam and Bonita in the same day, he began to despair that Pam didn’t care what he did when he wasn’t around her. He took refuge where he could, in drinking.

  Did the affair lead to the drinking, or the drinking to the affair? He’d never been able to decide, knowing just that it was a time of being lost, walking in circles, trying to find a way out among an infinity of ways that led nowhere. And it was only when Pam cut him loose, tired of the drinking and moping, that he was able to right himself, quit drinking, and work his way back to something that seemed, to him, normal.

  And considering this now—­the feeling of being lost, the inability to choose any particular direction—­Gordy realizes that he’s lost. Not metaphorically, but literally lost. He has wandered from the ruts and into some smaller trail, likely a deer trail that is beginning to get smaller and smaller.

  The only thing to do is to go back and walk carefully, feeling the way with his feet until he hits the ruts of the old logging road again, and then head either out or back to Pam’s and his cruiser. The logging road isn’t far. He comes on it in a matter of only a few minutes. But once back to the logging road, he has to decide whether he needs to turn right or left to make it out to Town Pound Road. There’s not enough sunlight through the solid gray clouds to indicate direction. He curses himself for not paying more attention as he came down the road. To wander off a logging road is pretty hard to do, and to lose one’s direction is just plain stupid, but he has, and now he has to make a decision. Only he doesn’t. If he turns the correct way, he will walk on to Town Pound Road. If he goes the wrong way, he will be back at Pam’s and his cruiser. He turns left and starts walking, and he walks until he comes up to the broken brush that lead to the white Lexus, and, beyond that, to Pam’s little farm.

  “You forget something?” she asks as he walks back between the goat pens.

  “No, not really.”

  “Got lost, huh?”

  “Yeah. I guess I did.”

  “It’s all right. The logging road comes out just a quarter mile beyond Bird Creek. Can’t really miss it if you’re paying attention.”

  “And why didn’t you tell me this earlier?”

  “You seemed set on a walk through the woods. I wasn’t going to spoil that for you.”

  “Well, thanks for that. I think I’ll just get in the cruiser and head back to the station. We’ll have someone out here to get the car off the property.”

  “Gordy, when you get to the end of River Rock Road, turn left.”

  “I haven’t forgotten.”

  “Could have fooled me.”

  RONNY FORBERT STAYS in bed after he wakes. He goes back over the whole scene in his mind. Why didn’t he give Matt Laferiere a field sobriety test? He tried, but Matt refused. Is that right? Is that true? Did he try? He thinks he did. He’s pretty sure of it. He got Laferiere into position, legs spread, hands on top of car.

  He took one hand down. Right? Left? Right. Cuffed it. Pulled the other hand down. That’s when it all started. Lafer
iere spun to his left and tried to grab him by the back. He spun around himself, grabbing Laferiere by the front of his jacket. They spun together and Laferiere slipped. Or did he slip? He slipped. Laferiere came across his body and thumped against Ronny’s leg. He went down and sprawled into the road, which lit up with the headlights of the car. Did he put his leg out to trip Laferiere? No. Yes? He can’t remember.

  He gets up, starts the coffee, goes back into the bedroom, and gets down on the floor. He stretches his hamstrings, quads, and lats. He does one hundred crunches, a hundred reverse crunches, then forty push-­ups. He struggles with the last four or five of the push-­ups. How long has it been since he’s been in the gym? He had better get in there today. He is starting to feel the deterioration already.

  While he showers, he goes through it all in his mind again. The leg. That’s what really bothers him. His leg. Did he deliberately try to trip Matt? Did he do it accidentally? Did he do it at all? He feels the thump of Matt’s leg against his just as Matt lurches out onto the road. But this is new. He didn’t remember that earlier. Is it coming clear in his mind, or is he making this up?

  Out of the shower and dressed, he calls Nessa, and this time she picks up.

  “Hi. You have time to get some breakfast, before class?” he asks.

  “No. I’m afraid not. I have a final this morning at eleven. I don’t feel at all prepared for it. I need to study.”

  “How about after? Lunch? Dinner?”

  “No. I’m so sorry. Tomorrow I have two more finals. I’m going to be studying for those right up to the last minute. And one more the next day. Then I’m done. No more. I can do whatever I want, and I want to be with you. Is that OK? I know this is a really bad time for you. I know you need some company and some talk, and that I’m letting you down. I feel bad. This really makes me feel awful. Can you hang in there?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “I can hang in. You hang in, too. I remember what finals are like. But I need to see you. Soon. It’s kind of a rough time.”

  “I know it is. I’ll see you soon. Very soon. Promise. Call me whenever you want.”