by Justin Scott
“Our local farmer,” Henry King explained in a hearty voice debunked by a tight smile. As Mr. Butler drew near, preceded pungently by whiffs of exhaust, King walked toward the fence and waved, “Hello neighbor.”
Mr. Butler never looked up. He stopped the machine, tipped the trailer to dump the silage, blew three long, loud blasts on a horn, and thump-clattered back up the hill.
“Oh Henry,” the publicist gushed. “It’s so picturesque.”
Indeed it was. The tractor was red as kindergarten crayons, Mr. Butler as long-haired as a nineteenth century agrarian, his overalls as blue as the star field of the flag. The stink of diesel and silage weren’t so picturesque but the breeze was dissipating it somewhat.
“I abhor flies,” muttered Fiona, “and I rather doubt old Henry’s thought to lay on insect repellant.” A country girl from Essex, the British Ambassador’s wife saw what was coming long before King did.
“I’ve got a little in the car,” I said. “Would you—”
“Quickly.”
We hurried around the house to the motorcourt and found my mom’s Fiat tucked among the Mercedes and Land Rovers, looking as bored as an Italian countess at a suburban country club. I got the mini can of Deep Woods off! I keep in the glove compartment for swamp showings, and sprayed Fiona’s arms and spritzed her fingertips so she could do her face. Then I sprayed my hands and did my face and rubbed a little in my hair.
Our eyes met. We were well protected now—excessively so for a minor fly invasion, a prejudiced observer like her husband might say—with one major exception that neither was inclined to ignore. I’d had just enough champagne to answer the dare in her gaze with, “May I?”
“Please.” She lifted her skirt.
I knelt and sprayed. She eeked that it was cold, much to the amusement of the parking kids who seemed to think I was taking advantage of the situation. I asked her to turn around, then back again, and after awhile, she said, “I think that’s quite enough.”
I rose reluctantly and we walked back to the party, arriving on the terrace just as the woman who thought Farmer Butler picturesque cried, “Oh look! Cows!”
Mr. Butler was urging them through the gate at the top of the pasture. He needn’t have bothered. Ordinarily they’d mosey in, slowly, while their leaders sampled the grass. But either the sniff or sight of the silage, or the chow-time signal of the horn bore them down the long meadow like steeds of the Light Brigade.
Vicky drifted our way, eying the ambassador’s wife like a candidate for a flogging. I reached out quickly and whisked her cheek with my hand.
“What are you doing?”
“Fly,” I said, holding its body up for inspection. “Here, put some off! on. And spray Tim, while you’re at it. He’s looking vulnerable.”
Vicky shook the can dubiously. “I’m surprised there’s any left. Her pantyhose are soaked.”
“Stockings.”
“What?”
“She’s not wearing pantyhose.”
“You should not be allowed out with adults.”
“The British Ambassador seems to like you.”
“We were discussing the English roots of New England government.”
“I shouldn’t be allowed out with adults? Benedict Arnold ran that line on Betsy Ross.”
Here and there around the terrace, conversation faltered and guests waved the air as a swarm sated on cow arrived to sample human. It was a minor annoyance, hardly noticed at first, even when a bare-shouldered lady ran indoors and others herded after her. But when the Osaka industrialist stalked toward the motorcourt, pressing an ice cube to a welt on his cheek, Henry King started yelling at the caterers.
I drained another glass of champagne and admired the cool waters of Lake Vixen. Fiona glided alongside, inquiring, “Do you suppose that old farmer did that deliberately?”
“Very.”
“Poor Henry,” she said. “Such a gift for antagonism—What’s that?”
She had turned deathly pale. I had felt it too, an urgent thump up from the ground, like the shockwave of a distant explosion.
Fiona flung a frightened look at her husband, saw he was all right, and recovered with a nervous laugh. “I thought we were back in Jerusalem—good Lord! Look!”
A cloud of spray was rising from the dam.
The concrete spillway gave a shiver as if it were made of Jell-O. Slowly, majestically, it slid into the waterfall. Angry white water tumbled after it, curling through the slot where it had disappeared—a fierce new waterfall unrestrained by concrete. It flowed hard and wide, tearing at the earthworks exposed by the vanished spillway, and roared dark brown into the valley below.
Chapter 7
The explosion stampeded the cows back up the pasture and Henry King’s guests onto the terrace where they stared in disbelief and terror. Time had passed since 9/11—time enough to joke about color-coded cautions. We even had a new expression for shoddy excuses: “Blame it on 9/11.” But terror lingered and Bali and the Cole and suicide bombers were never far from our minds. I felt my scalp tingling and knew I wasn’t the only one who wondered, where’s the next bomb? Which way do we run?
In an amazingly short time, the water was gone. The scale of the transformation was enormous. The gazebo towered on pilings like an oil rig, and Lake Vixen was an empty bowl of mud, seething here and there with puddles of stranded fish.
The mood changed. Relief at no second explosion. The distance from the house played a part, too; nothing was damaged, except for the lake. Copious amounts of champagne already consumed, and an excellent desert-and-camel joke provoked laughter, which angry glances from Henry King stifled into hysterical snickers. All at once, everyone got the bright idea to go down for a closer look.
Bottles were snatched from serving maids, and forty or fifty of us trooped across a lawn blessedly free of the flies that the cows had taken with them. Somewhat looped on Veuve Clicquot, I found myself romping between earnest Tim Hall, murmuring, “Poor Mr. King,” and a seductively smashed Vicky McLachlan, who kept bumping into me with firm hips, soft breasts and giggled apologies.
I had a champagne epiphany: Vicky was my best friend in the world and I had really been stupid with her. As the insight further manifested as a deep ache in my groin, I began to pray that Tim would disappear in one of the many mudholes scattered about the lake bed.
Glancing back at the house, I saw Henry King shouting into a cell phone—calling the cops—while resisting the staffers who were urging him inside. Fiona and the ambassador were disappearing in the direction of the cars, flanked by their uniformed chauffeur and a dangerous-looking young Brit with his hand in a shoulder bag.
Their SAS bodyguard, I realized, and felt a little silly for a moment, seeing the explosion through the eyes of people who had been targets in crueler parts of the world.
When I looked again, Julia Devlin was at King’s side, speaking urgently, guiding him indoors and ordering staff to secure Mrs. King, who was wandering around the lawn in a daze. By then, I was convinced the danger was over. Mainly because I assumed that Mr. Butler—fed up with lawyers and low-flying helicopters—had blown up King’s dam exactly as he had threatened.
We skirted the muddy banks, heading for the wrecked dam, which had blown into numerous large chunks of concrete tangled together with steel reinforcing bars. Then Vicky crashed softly into me again and I was back home in Newbury where feuds were comical by comparison.
“Mrs. Ambassador ran away,” she whispered.
“So did Mr. Ambassador.”
“Can you tell me what to do with Tim?”
“Beats me,” I said stupidly and regretted it a long time after.
Vicky kicked off her shoes and stepped into the mud.
“What are you doing?” called Tim. “You’ll cut your feet.”
“I want to see. Who’s coming with me?”
Up at the house, steel shutters were belatedly sliding over the windows, butto
ning it up like a bunker. Over on the helipad, the Bell Ranger rotors began circling with a whine. While down the driveway roared the ambassador’s Daimler limousine, swaying through the turns the way cars do when they’re weighted down with armor and bulletproof glass.
I pulled off my shoes and socks and rolled up my trousers. Vicky passed me her bottle. “Come on Tim. Chicken.”
Tim warned we’d cut our feet.
“He’s probably right,” I said.
“That’s ridiculous. Before there was mud there was grass. There’s nothing to cut our feet on.”
In fact, there were things sticking up out of the mud, including an oddly crooked thick root that reminded me of something. I started toward it for a closer look.
“Ow!”
I caught Vicky, saved her from falling face flat in the mud. “You okay?”
“No, it hurts.”
“Can you walk?”
“I can hop.”
“I’ll carry you.”
Vicky was an armful in the best sense, and a very light armful at that. And an armful of intimate memories. I scooped her up easily and walked her back to Tim. Anyone with half a brain would have recognized lovers. But the vanished lake still had everyone’s attention. I handed her up to him. Tim’s a fair-size guy, but she looked heavy in his arms.
“Where you going?” they asked.
“Saw something. I’ll be right back.”
The wind carried the approaching howl of Trooper Moody’s siren. I forged back through the mud that had spilled from the lake, searching for the funny shape that had caught my eye just before Vicky cut her foot. I spotted it again, a muddy root or tree branch with a crook in it that made it look like a man’s boot.
Closer, I saw why. It was a man’s boot, a good-looking cowboy boot, the outlines of the tooling showing through a skim of mud. It was attached to a leg. I tugged. The leg came too easily. Then I saw a hand in a deerskin glove eight or ten feet away, and I realized this was going to be a lot worse than it looked.
Chapter 8
I staggered back, frantic to look away. Green trees, blue heavens, puzzled friends lurching around the lawn. Anything that wasn’t the horror scattered at my feet.
High on the horizon rose the rim of the Butler farm. Above it, silhouetted against the sharp sky, I saw Mr. Butler standing on his Farmall, watching. He was far away, but the sun shone brightly on the red tractor and the flicker of his windblown hair.
If I’d taken King’s peacemaking assignment more seriously, if I’d gone back to Mr. Butler one more time, could I have prevented this?
The state police siren got shrill.
I wished I knew a better candidate among the fifty or so people staring at the mud to tell the man that his son was dead. I forced another stomach-wrenching look. Enough details might keep him from coming down to see for himself.
The spillway had cracked like eggshells. Some of the pieces had burnt edges. I could guess the center of the blast by the re-bars broken as if something very large had snapped the steel in its jaws. But all I could see of Dicky was that one booted leg and his gloved hand. God knew where the rest of him was: deep in mud, or sluiced downstream in the water path.
Far off I heard the exuberant horns of Newbury’s fire trucks—young men and women exulting on powerful machines—and did not envy the volunteers their search.
Ollie arrived first. His big silver-gray Ford swung around the house, bounced down the lawn, headlights flashing, siren whooping drunks out of his way.
I slogged out of the mud, trying to step in the tracks I’d left coming in, sat on the grass beside a puddle, splashed the mud off my feet, and put on my shoes and socks. My hands were shaking and I felt sick.
Ollie came storming over just as I stood up.
“What were you doing in there?”
“Dicky Butler’s dead.”
For a second the tension went out of the state trooper. His broad shoulders sagged and the anger that was the perpetual foundation for the structure of his face melted away, leaving it smooth and almost benign. Bye-bye false arrest suit.
“You sure?”
“Blown apart.”
“You touch anything?”
“His boot.”
“Don’t you know better than to keep your paws off a crime scene?”
I repeated the phrase that had provoked Ollie to hit Dicky with his Mag light and walked away. People had fallen silent, realizing something was terribly wrong. Vicky limped up to me. “What happened?”
“Dicky Butler blew himself up.”
“Oh, my God.”
“I gotta tell Mr. Butler.” I eyed the field and the woods beyond, scouting a route to the Butler farm, dreading arrival.
“Do you want me to come with you?”
She had not grown up in Newbury, and I asked, “How well do you know him?”
“He came in to talk about his taxes.”
“Better not. I’ll catch you later.”
I headed across the fields, and through the woods, up a steep incline, half hoping Mr. Butler would have driven off before I got there. But no such luck. The Farmall was right where I’d seen it. DaNang was stretched out in its shade. Mr. Butler sat smiling like an old Indian watching settlers’ wagons burn.
“What the hell happened?” he asked cheerfully.
I caught my breath. From Butler’s field the devastation looked spectacular, the lake bed raw brown, the land below it scoured by the escaping water.
“What happened?”
My courage fled. I looked past him, unable to speak the words that would change his life.
Behind this crest, which looked down on King’s place, Butler’s farm spread up a gentle rise. If on that mud-gray March day with Dicky I’d seen why farmers move to the city, this glorious August afternoon was the image of why they stayed.
Mr. Butler’s hayfields rippled orange-gold in the wind. The trees that traced centuries-old stone walls between the fields shimmered deep green. Maples in the distance puddled shade on the house. The house was far away, but it looked like they had painted it. And the main barn as well.
“You painted the barn?”
“Yeah, Dicky really got into it. Now he’s doing the house.”
I hadn’t expected this and it made it worse.
Mr. Butler was watching me, mildly puzzled.
The next pasture over was dotted white. It looked like Scotland. “I didn’t know you raised sheep.”
“Yeah, we was supposed to sell the lambs, but I kept ’em. They eat that field down of bushes and weeds. And DaNang likes ’em, don’t you, DaNang? Hey, you—sheep your buddies?… So what’s happenin’, Ben?”
“Looks like Dicky blew up King’s dam.”
“Dicky? Dicky don’t know shit about explosives.”
Based on the evidence, he certainly didn’t.
“Mr. Butler, I’m afraid—”
He looked at me sharply. “Why you blamin’ Dicky? He don’t know dynamite. He don’t know blasting caps. He don’t know timers.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Butler. He blew himself up.”
“That’s impossible.”
“It must have gone off early.”
“But I’m telling you, Dicky don’t know to set a charge.”
I shut up. There was nothing else to say. Finally he said, “You telling me you saw Dicky dead?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Oh, Christ.” He fumbled for the starter. The tractor clattered.
“Don’t go down there, Mr. Butler.”
“My boy—”
“You don’t want to see it, sir. You really don’t.”
He jerked his head sharply toward the sky. I thought I’d somehow convinced him not to go down. But then I heard what he had heard, a dull thud-thud. His eyes got wild. “Jesus Christ, what’s happening—”
His muscles bunched and he seemed about to dive under the tractor. “Just a helicopter, Mr. Butler.
See?” I pointed out the dot coming from the northeast.
He squinted, saw something about it that put him at ease, and sat back, rocking on the tractor seat, squeezing his arms around his body. His gaze returned to the mud where Dicky lay scattered. DaNang started whining. Mr. Butler reached down to rough his ears.
The helicopter clattered onto the lawn beside the former lake. From where we watched we could see markings top and sides, big white letters, ATF. Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the federal bomb squad. Mr. Butler cast dull eyes on the agents tumbling out in yellow windbreakers. He didn’t seem to notice the second helicopter, marked FBI, which buzzed in swiftly from the west, spilling men and women who set up a perimeter and forced King’s guests further from the explosion site than Ollie had. But when a third swooped in, an evil-looking, unmarked gunship, he muttered, “CIA? Damned fools think it’s terrorists.”
Glad to shift his thoughts from Dicky, I said, “Yeah, well he was head of the Security Council.”
“Son of a bitch thinks he’s such hot stuff only international terrorists can touch him.”
“Everybody’s got a job, right? ATF for the explosives. FBI for an attack on the government. CIA for any possible espionage implications…you know, Homeland Security?”
Mr. Butler looked at me like I was press secretary for President Nixon. Ultimately, of course, the bombing of King’s dam would be a Connecticut State Police case. After a bundle of taxes was spent confirming that Dicky Butler was neither Al Qaeda terrorist, spy, assassin, nor serial bomber.
“You sure it’s Dicky?”
“Yes, sir. I’m sorry.”
He rubbed his battered hand over his face. “Ben, leave me alone, okay?”
“Can I do anything for you?”
“Just split.”
“Maybe I’ll drive up and see you tonight.”
“No.”
He started the tractor again and turned it around, DaNang scrambling from the wheels. “Thanks for coming to tell me. You’re a good kid, Ben.”
Head bowed, he drove off, the yellow dog trotting wearily after him. They skirted the hayfield and out through a cow-bar opening in the stone wall, and disappeared in the direction of their house.