by Louise Penny
In hindsight, I should have run. Run far away to a place with great diving and no extradition, like Indonesia or São Tomé & Principe. If I thought the bayou was murky, taking on the IRS offered more snakes and snags than even the worst underwater nightmare. And I’d spent so much money on security, I couldn’t have afforded a decent attorney even if they hadn’t found what was left.
Huntsville is even louder than the Oaks of Davenport Apartment Homes, what with the clanging and coughing and dubious grunting of my fellow incarcerated citizens. Between the noise and the thin, scratchy blankets, I’m right back where I started not sleeping very well. And when I lie down at night, I still smell the stink of the bayou on my skin and see the visions of snakes and skeleton cops lurking in every shadow to demand their money at gunpoint. In the waking world, however, I no longer worry about the money’s original owners catching up with me—not even stuck here in Huntsville, so easy to find. The money is gone, and gone for good. And anyone who ever comes asking about it could damn well take it up with Abigail Larson. But I wouldn’t recommend it.
Scott Loring Sanders
Waiting on Joe
from Shooting Creek and Other Stories
Erick, my Lab-chow mutt, was down at the treeline chewing on something, content, gnawing and licking the marrow from whatever creature he’d rooted up. On the porch, I attempted to keep my wood shavings in a neat pile as I worked on a replica of Erick, made from a soft chunk of poplar. Wood, it seemed, consumed every aspect of my life. I lived in the woods, I worked on a Christmas tree farm, and during my free time I was either splitting firewood or whittling to avoid the wife.
It had been a tough winter for me and Deborah, cooped up together far longer than was tolerable. She’d been pretty removed lately, and I didn’t possess the proper tools to cheer her, neither in my pants nor in my brain. She’d gotten laid off from her secretary job at the dentist’s office (or possibly fired; she’d been a bit murky with the details), so we weren’t exactly happy or flush.
I used the tip of my Buck knife to replicate Erick’s muscular haunches while the real Erick sprawled in the not-yet-green grass, still chomping away. That dog was always scavenging, bringing stuff home—woodchucks, squirrels, a three-foot copperhead once. During the spring melt he’d often drag back field dressings the hunters had left behind, my lawn resembling a full-blown yard sale composed of deer parts.
Inside, Deborah rummaged around, finally awake. She seemed to be sleeping later and later these days, going to bed earlier and earlier. Always on the computer, Facebooking or whatever the hell. Some nights I wanted to climb on the roof and rip down that satellite dish, get rid of our Internet, television, the whole goddamned bundle, as it were, toss it in the fucking dumpster. Hard to justify such luxuries when we had bills to pay, groceries to buy. She’d often talked of getting her degree at Community, but I hadn’t once seen her make a move in that direction. Come to think of it, the only move I’d seen her make lately was toward another beer. Which made me sick. Only added to the problems. I think it’s a weak man (or woman) who uses alcohol to wash away their troubles. Me, well, I never had a taste for it.
My fingers had turned fat and thick from the cold, the unforgiving winter refusing to let go just yet, so my carving was over for the morning. I set my knife and miniature Erick on the table and opened and closed my frozen hands as if casting a spell, attempting to work some blood back in. I whistled for Erick and he popped to attention, his find still stuffed in his jaws.
As he trotted across the yard, wood smoke caught the breeze and trickled down from the chimney, lightly fogging him. Tinges of red shimmered in his black coat when the sun hit it right. He was a tough old bastard. Seventy pounds, solid muscle, total badass. Far as I was concerned, flawless. Deborah felt otherwise.
“He just puked up a baby rabbit on the new rug, Steven,” she’d once said. “Jesus Christ, it stinks.” And it had stunk, granted, but if a dead rabbit was rotting in your gut, you’d probably throw up too. He was just a dog being a dog, couldn’t blame him for that.
He chewed a beer can all to shit one time, which Deborah consequently stepped on, slicing her big toe on the way to the toilet in the middle of the night. He’d puked up plastic Kroger bags on a few occasions. Ate a dirty diaper once. Also an entire junior-sized Wilson leather football. We didn’t have kids and I sure as hell had never changed a diaper. Hadn’t tossed a ball since grade school. Where he’d found such items was a mystery.
Deborah had issues with Erick, fair enough, but you can’t hold a dog accountable for following its instincts. Like now, for instance.
As he got closer, I tried to determine what he held so happily. A naked baby doll? The coloring was right. Shoot, he’d found a football once, why not a Barbie? I went to the top stair to greet him, and that’s when my heart stuttered. Clamped between his jowls was a human foot, sawed off three inches above the ankle, the skin ragged and jagged as if chewed by some toothy monster. Erick swooshed his tail proudly.
“Shit, Erick,” I muttered, glancing behind me. I guess my body language suggested he’d done something wrong, because his tail stopped wagging, his head drooped to hangdog. “It’s okay, boy,” I half whispered. “Drop it.”
He was having none of it. Sensing I was up to something, he tried to make a break for it, unwilling to surrender his trophy. I snatched his collar and grabbed his bottom jaw. “Drop it,” I said again, more forcefully. Erick’s ears pinned back, his front paws digging in. The foot’s stiff toes brushed my wrist, which freaked me out. “Motherfucker,” I grunted through clenched teeth, realizing my only choice was to grasp that slobber-coated foot like it was Erick’s favorite tennis ball. He immediately took it for a game, like a goddamned tug-o-war, and we both pulled and held on with the stubbornness of snapping turtles. But when I said, “Chase? You wanna chase?” that did the trick and he let go.
He started barking when I didn’t hold up my end of the bargain. “Be quiet,” I whisper-pleaded, knowing Deborah would open that front door any second now, furious, only to discover me hugging a hairy human foot. I scurried up the steps, grabbed the sports section from a stack of old newspapers, and quickly wrapped that thing as if rolling the world’s biggest joint. I twisted the ends, then rewrapped with the classifieds. Erick was going apeshit, pissed I’d stolen his treasure.
I held the package tight to my chest, then walked inside and beelined for the woodstove. Bacon sizzled in the kitchen, a spatula clinking against a skillet, no doubt Deborah making exactly five pieces for her own self and exactly zero for me, a perfect illustration of where our marriage stood.
“Shut that dog up,” she yelled. I envisioned her bleached hair pulled up high on her head in a ponytail as she squinted, a nasty cigarette waggling in her squeezed lips, her face not nearly as pretty as it once was.
“I’ll try, dear,” I said, stuffing Erick’s offering into the coals, using the poker to push it way back. The man’s leg hairs ignited and I got a strong whiff before closing the door. Deborah didn’t need to know about Erick’s discovery. Not just yet. “Sorry. I think he’s hungry is all.”
“Well, feed him already. Christ, it’s too early. I got a ripping headache.”
I walked back outside, Erick still yammering about how I’d betrayed him. “Come on, boy,” I said, then zipped my jacket snug, grabbed a shovel, headed for the woods. The snow, the ice, it could only keep evil doings hid for so long. “Hike, boy? Wanna go for a hike?”
It was a pretty sorry excuse for a grave. But when dug in haste, and with fatigue setting in after sawing and digging and lugging and burying, a bit of slack had to be extended when it came to the particulars.
Erick had really gone to town—dirt scattered every which way, dead leaves strewn about like feathers from a slaughtered goose. The only body part I saw was a leg wearing a scrap of blue jean, and that was enough for me; no reason to delve deeper. Wasn’t like I needed to confirm his face; I knew good and well who he was. I hoped Erick hadn’t alre
ady carried off the head or arms or whatever, leaving bits of the man scattered about like a trail of breadcrumbs.
Erick had led me right to the plot, using an established deer path that meandered through oaks and rhododendron thickets. It was also a path that, if followed for another half mile, would’ve taken me straight to Willie Koonz’s back door. Willie, as it so happened, was the man currently half buried in the soil. He had two kids and a wife, them wondering where he’d run off to three months prior. He’d been my supervisor. The guy I’d worked with on the tree farm for five years. He was also the guy who’d been fucking my wife for the past eight months before he disappeared, sneaking through these very woods, on this very deer path, during lunch hour. Supposedly he went home to eat during our break while me and the Mexicans stayed in the fields, our boots dangling over pickup tailgates, me eating partially frozen peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, them gorging on still-hot tamales wrapped tightly in corn husks that their pretty wives—with skin like warm honey—had, earlier that morning, cooked and sealed in foil, which in turn always made me envious, but I never had the gumption to ask if maybe (just once) they’d bring an extra for me, them probably thinking I was pleased as punch with the cold, stale gringo sandwiches I slapped together every morning because my wife sure as shit didn’t make them for me, her still sleeping away, waiting for lunchtime so my boss could come over and give her the business in my own bed while my bony ass turned numb on the freezing metal ridges of that aforementioned tailgate.
So, yeah, there was that.
I’d figured out the affair a year back. The Mexicans were doing the season’s first mowing while me and Willie planted seedlings on a hillside. Squatting, kneeling, digging little holes, dropping in trees no higher than a hand. Long, sunny days but not so damn hot like it would be in another month, when we’d be culling dead trees, the son-of-a-bitching yellow jackets in the ground, lying in wait for you to step on their nests, or the hornets in their paper globes tucked in the trees, praying you’d slice into their hive with your trimming machete so they could zoom out like a squadron of fighter jets, just for the fun of it. But in March and April things were still pleasant. The magenta of redbuds dotting the mountainsides, the white of dogwoods. Oaks dropping their tassels from the sky like heavenly pipe cleaners.
When it’s just you and one other guy, and that guy’s come back from lunch, and he smells strangely familiar, in fact smells not only like that perfume your wife insists on—which she can only find at select TJ Maxx stores—but also like the unmistakable sweaty sex of her puss, well, you start to wonder. Then, when the breeze shifts and Willie is upwind of you, and suddenly Deborah’s fragrance filters down the slope and your nose starts twitching the same as Erick’s when he whiffs an injured bunny rabbit, well, your brain starts connecting the dots, puts the pieces together. A man knows his wife’s odor, that’s all I’m saying.
That, in and of itself, wasn’t enough proof. Hell, maybe Willie’s wife smelled similar. I mean, maybe it’s like snowflakes. Every one of them’s different, but from a distance they all appear pretty damn equal. So it’s not out of the realm of possibility that Deborah and Willie’s wife could’ve had a nearly identical odor. They live within a mile of each other, probably our wells are tapped into the same aquifer—pardon the expression—so maybe it’s in the water. Who’s to say? All I know is when that pleasant breeze drifted down the hillside, there was no doubt Deborah’s unique and particular aroma floated on that stream of lazy, warm air.
A few weeks later, me and Willie are fertilizing when he gets to ripping on me. He was always bullying, but that day it was with more oomph. “Don’t you got goals, Steve? What’re you doing with your life?”
I hated when people called me Steve. My name’s Steven, I always introduced myself as such, and I’d corrected Willie many times. “Doing about the same as you,” I said. “We’re both dipping our hands into dried-up horseshit, which, by some weird-ass miracle, makes trees grow.”
“Yeah, but this is temporary for me,” he said. “I got bigger plans.”
“Five years on the job doesn’t sound very temporary, Willie. Five years sounds pretty permanent.”
He spit, wiping tobacco trickle into his beard. “I’ve got some stuff on the side,” he said. “Me and my brother, we been investing in shit. You ever heard of semiconductors?”
“Like a part-time orchestra leader?” I said, messing with him. If there was one thing I knew, it was technology. I only had a high school diploma, but I was always playing with electronics, tinkering. Probably had the fastest Wi-Fi connection in the county, not that Deborah appreciated it. Something I’d learned over the years was that people generally thought I was stupid. No matter, because I’d found it to be an asset. When people assume you’re dumb, they let down their guard.
“I don’t know how they work,” he said, “but Barth says it’s related to cell phones. We’ve been dumping money into this company he knows of, got an inside tip, and it’s about to hit big. That’s what I mean, Steve. I got plans, man, more than baling and loading fucking Christmas trees the rest of my life.”
“Semiconductors, huh? Like you talking about core cooling capacitors, that type of shit?” I was that kid you probably went to school with, the one always tearing apart radios, TVs, just to see how they worked, then putting them back together.
“Speak English, man. I swear you’re worse than them goddamn wetbacks half the time. I don’t know what the fuck you just said. Anyway, you need to think bigger.” Willie reached into his fertilizer bag and tossed a handful around the base of a Fraser fir. “Stop acting like an idiot, wasting your time carving stupid shit out of wood. You need to plan for your future.”
“Hmm, maybe so,” I said. And I did start planning, right then, because I’d never discussed my whittling with him. In fact, I’d never mentioned it to anyone, other than Deb, obviously. It was private, just something I did. And me and Willie, we didn’t mingle outside of work. When we’d first met, there’d been discussions of us and the wives getting together to grill burgers, the way new acquaintances will do, imagining they’ve found that perfect match where the wives have everything in common, scrapbooking and collecting Longaberger baskets or Beanie Babies, and the guys love bow hunting and Earnhardt—but that never panned out. So there was no way he could’ve known about me carving “stupid shit out of wood” unless he’d been to my house. Not just to my house, but inside, and not just inside, but all the way back to my bedroom, where I kept my finished pieces on a dresser, mostly of Erick in various states of repose. So that, along with the stink of my wife on his clothes, well, that got me to planning for my future all right.
“You ever seen Risky Business?” continued Willie, chuckling. “God, what a great movie. ‘Sometimes you just gotta say What the fuck, Steve.’ Best line ever.”
A stripe of spittle dripped from his beard like lace from a spider’s ass, and I considered countering with a quote of my own, lifted from a fortune cookie I’d once cracked open. “Live life like a mighty river.” I loved that. I was a mighty river, ready to unleash my power. But in my own way, on my own terms.
It was me who’d first discovered how bad off Joe actually was. I was late for work, zipping my old Charger tight around a corner, when I nearly hit him as he walked the road’s edge, gimping along. I braked, rolled down the passenger window. “What do you know good, old man?” I said. He caught my eye, then kept on. I nudged the car forward. “Jump in, Joe, before you get killed. Where you heading?”
He glanced over but didn’t stop. “Gotta see the doc. Alternator belt’s shot on my truck.”
“The doctor? In town? That’s ten miles. Get your ass in here before I jump out and stuff you in.”
“You wrassle with a rattlesnake, you bound to get bit,” he said, taking a long, deep draw from his cigarette. Deborah had gotten her orneriness honestly, that’s for sure, but he did concede, opened the door, started to enter.
“Whoa, hold up,” I said, raising m
y free hand. “You can’t smoke in here.”
Joe stopped midstream, tightened his jaw, began walking again, not bothering to close my door. “Go piss your pants, you son of a bitch.”
“Shit,” I muttered, inching the car forward, careful not to slap his ass with the open door. I leaned across the huge front seat, yelled to him. “C’mon, I’m sorry. Finish up and get in.”
He kept walking, ignoring me, but I wouldn’t relent. Finally he flicked his cigarette into the broom sedge and entered, the whole process a struggle as he twisted that twisted body into the front seat. His chest heaved in small spurts.
“You really need to quit smoking, Joe.”
“Just drive, peckerhead.” He stared at me, his eyes as hard and dark as the coal he’d extracted from the ground for fifty years.
I liked Joe well enough. Grouchy old thing, tough as leather plow line, his body bent and mangled like a crashed car, but he always told it straight.
“What’re you going in for?” I asked.
“Cain’t breathe, Steve,” he said, lighting a fresh cigarette. “Reckon doc’s gonna tell me for certain what I already been knowing for years.”
So it was me who’d been with Joe when he’d received the official news, only a month after I’d learned his daughter was screwing Willie. He had the black lung—which might sound horrible—but for a retired coal miner it meant a check he could live out his days on, something to leave for his family.
The doctor brought in X-rays, clamped them to the backlit screen. Joe hadn’t wanted me in there, had said, “Get on to work before I slit your throat,” but his rheumy eyes said something different. So I insisted, ignored his objections. Those X-rays looked like some foreign black universe with a splattering of white stars. Each star, explained the doc, was coal dust, scarring the lungs. Joe didn’t ask questions, just gazed ahead, absorbing it as if he’d known since boyhood this day was inevitable. He’d left school in eighth grade to enter the mines, only exited a few years back. That was the shit of it all. Work fifty years underground just to be put back in it permanently, right when you’d finally come up for air. As if day by day, year by year, all you’d been doing was digging your own grave.