Snake Eater

by William G. Tapply

  I grinned. Sweeney had Daniel’s blend of Scottish burr and Georgia farmboy down pat.

  “So, anyway,” he continued after a moment, “that’s how come we called him Snake Eater. It’s like, there are lots of godfathers. But only one you actually call Godfather. Listen, you want another beer?”

  “After this conversation, I could use something.”

  Sweeney grinned. “Didn’t mean to freak you out, there, Brady. I just—shit, I miss Daniel, that’s all. Helps, talking about him.”

  I nodded.

  “Hang on. I’ll be right back.”

  He headed back to the house. I shaded my eyes and tried to spot Terri. I didn’t see her.

  Sweeney was back in a few minutes. He handed me a beer.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “We had to go through places where they had defoliated,” he said. “We didn’t know there was a problem.”

  “Agent Orange,” I said.

  He nodded. “Most of us got it. I guess Pollard and Colletti were about the only ones who didn’t.”

  “How’d they manage to escape it?”

  Sweeney shrugged. “Just lucky, I guess. Galinski died of it. His widow got a little settlement from Uncle. Me and Daniel, we tried to get some help. Daniel’s friend there…”

  “Charlie McDevitt.”

  “Yeah. Charlie. He tried to help us.”

  “Charlie’s a friend of mine. That’s how I met Daniel.”

  “I know. When he was in jail. Anyway, Charlie tried to help us, but we got the runaround.”

  “Does smoking marijuana help you?” I said.

  He cocked his head at me, then smiled. “Yeah. It’s the only thing that helps. Daniel kept me supplied. Don’t know what the fuck I’m gonna do now. Try growing my own, I guess.”

  A woman bumped up against Sweeney and grabbed onto his arm. “Hey, Bri’,” she slurred. “How they hangin’?”

  He looked at her, then smiled. He put his arm across her shoulders. “How you makin’ out, Ronnie?”

  “Jus’ pissa.”

  She was probably in her forties. She was fat and graying, but she had youthful skin.

  She was very drunk.

  Sweeney nudged her to look at me. “Ronnie Galinski,” he said, “this is Brady Coyne. Daniel’s lawyer.”

  She looked at me without interest, then turned back to Sweeney. “Don’t know why the fuck I’m here,” she said. “Wouldn’ta come, but Neddie woulda wanted me to. Neddie loved the bas’ard. Sumbitch got Neddie killed.”

  “It wasn’t Daniel’s fault,” said Sweeney gently.

  “That shit jus’ ate him up, Bri’,” she said. “His legs swole up and his skin fell off and his brain caught fire.”

  Sweeney put his arm around her. “I know, hon,” he said softly. “I remember.”

  Sweeney glanced at me, then gently steered Ronnie Galinski away. He had his arm across her shoulders, and he was bending to her, talking to her.

  Galinski. That, I recalled, was the name of the soldier who had died of Agent Orange poisoning. His widow was not, apparently, a Daniel McCloud fan.

  I felt something soft brush the back of my neck. I turned around. Terri said, “Hi.”

  I touched her hair. “Having fun?”

  “Weirdest wake I’ve ever been to. Quite an assortment, huh?”

  “Daniel’s friends.”

  “One guy got my ear,” she said. “One of Daniel’s men. I wouldn’t say he was exactly a friend. Tall, skinny man named Shaw. He was talking about how they all had to go through this defoliated part of the jungle, and they ended up with skin problems. It sounded as if he was blaming Daniel.”

  “I’ve been talking to Brian Sweeney. He seems to credit Daniel for getting them out of there alive.”

  Terri nodded. “Yeah, well this Shaw, he mainly blames Daniel for getting them in there in the first place.”

  A motive for murder, I thought. I did not share my thought with Terri.

  We stood there together quietly for a while, watching the people and sipping our beers. It was not an uncomfortable silence between us. After a while, I said, “How’s Cammie doing?”

  “Good, I’d say. She seems to know everybody.”

  At that moment I became aware of a noise. It was a low, rising wail, and it came from the edge of the river at the far end of Daniel’s property, and it took me a moment to identify it.

  A bagpipe.

  Gradually the hum of a hundred voices died and the wail of the pipes rose and moved into a long slow version of “Amazing Grace.”

  I felt a tightening in my throat and a burning in my eyes.

  Bagpipes always do that to me.

  Without speaking, Terri and I began to walk arm-in-arm toward the source of the music. I was aware that everybody else was following the music also, a silent mass of people moving toward the river as if hypnotized by those pipes.

  The piper stood on the low bluff overlooking the Connecticut River. He was dressed in tartans and kilt. He was a big, rawboned guy, red-haired and red-faced. The crowd gathered at the bluff, a little aside from the piper. I glanced around. Nobody was smiling, nobody was talking.

  He segued into “The Skye Boat Song.” I heard Terri whispering beside me. “Speed bonny boat like a bird on the wing…”

  The crowd moved and parted and Cammie and Brian Sweeney appeared, walking slowly. I noticed that they were barefoot. Sweeney’s arm was around Cammie’s waist. She carried a blue ceramic urn in both of her hands.

  Daniel.

  Behind the two of them strode seven other men, also barefoot, including Roscoe Pollard and Vinnie Colletti.

  “That’s Shaw,” whispered Terri. “The bald one.”

  He was the last of the seven. The others shuffled along with their heads down. Shaw’s head was up, and he appeared to be marching.

  I looked around the crowd for Ronnie Galinski, but I didn’t spot her. I guessed she might have passed out somewhere.

  Cammie and Sweeney and the other seven filed down over the bluff to the river. The rest of us closed in behind them at the edge of the water.

  The piper continued to play.

  Cammie and Sweeney waded knee-deep into the water. The other seven gathered in a semicircle around them. They made cups of their hands as if they were at the altar rail receiving communion. Cammie moved from one to the other, pouring in a portion of Daniel’s ashes.

  The pipes rose, wailed, stopped.

  It was very still there beside the river.

  Sweeney held his cupped hands high in front of his face. The others imitated him. “So long, old Snake Eater,” he said. I thought I could see tears glitter in his eyes.

  They all let Daniel dribble through their fingers into the river.

  The piper played “Danny Boy.”

  Cammie waded out of the river. Daniel’s team followed behind her.

  We all fell in behind them and moved slowly back to the yard behind Daniel’s house. No one spoke.

  The piper, still back on the bluff by the river, played “Going Home,” the Dvorak tune. Terri wrapped her arms around my waist and cried against my chest. I rested my cheek on top of her head. I could have cried, too.

  Bagpipes do that to me.

  11

  THE GUESTS BEGAN TO shake hands and exchange hugs. The party was over. Terri and I were still standing there when Cammie came up behind me and grabbed my hand.

  “Can I talk to you for a minute?” she said.

  I turned to her. Her eyes were blazing. “What’s the matter?”

  “It’s that shithead Oakley. Come see.”

  She led me down the driveway to the road where all the cars and pickups were parked. Every one of them had a white rectangle tucked under the windshield wiper.

  I went to the nearest car, removed the ticket, and looked at it. Fifteen bucks for parking in a restricted zone. Sergeant Richard Oakley had signed it. I looked at Cammie and shrugged.

  “What can we do?” she said.

  “
If it’s illegal to park on this road, nothing.”

  “It’s harassment,” she said. “It’s… it’s perverted.”

  “Well,” I said, scratching my head, “we could sure make it awkward for our friend Oakley if everybody exercised his right to appeal the ticket at a clerk magistrate’s hearing.”

  “We can’t expect these people to do that. They have to work. Some of them have driven a long way to be here.”

  I nodded. “Not much we can do, then. I’ve got a feeling that complaining to the police won’t do much good.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “That’s probably just what Oakley wants. I don’t know what his problem is, but the hell with him. I’ll pay them myself. I don’t want all these people leaving with a bad taste in their mouth. Let’s collect them.”

  Cammie and I went up and down the street, removing all the tickets. There were fifty-three of them. Oakley had made out half of them. A cop named Wentzel did the other half. It would cost Cammie over $750 to pay them all.

  We went back to the house. “Don’t tell anybody,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  The shadows lengthened and a chill crept into the air. The people began to drift to their cars. Cammie and Brian Sweeney stood at the edge of the driveway, shaking hands and thanking everybody for coming. Terri and I fell in line.

  When we got to Cammie, she said to me, “Would you guys mind waiting? I’d like to talk to you for a minute.”

  “Sure. Okay.”

  Terri and I went back to the deck. I fished around the bottom of one of the washtubs, up to my elbow in half-melted ice, and found two cans of Budweiser. I gave one to Terri. We sat in deck chairs with our feet up on the railing and stared off toward Daniel’s river.

  “He’s probably in Holyoke by now,” I said.

  She nodded.

  “He’ll cross the line into Connecticut by dawn.”

  “Brady…” Terri reached over and held on to my hand.

  “He should reach the ocean sometime on Monday.”

  “That bagpiper,” she said.

  I nodded and sipped my beer.

  After that we didn’t talk. We continued to hold hands.

  After a while Cammie came back and sat down beside us. She sighed deeply. “What’d you think?” she said.

  “It was memorable,” I said. “Perfect. Was the piper your idea?”

  “Brian’s,” she said. “Having the rest of Daniel’s team do the ashes was his idea, too. I think Daniel would’ve liked it.”

  “Me, too,” I said. “Did Roscoe and Vinnie and Brian all leave?”

  She nodded. “They’re not very sociable. All of those guys are like that. They’re just different from other people.”

  “I wanted to ask them something,” I said.

  “What?”

  I hesitated. Then I said, “I guess a lot of the men got Agent Orange poisoning over there. The way Daniel did.”

  Cammie nodded. “Brian did. One man died of it. There were others.”

  “Well, it occurred to me…”

  “You think they blame Daniel?”

  “That Shaw does,” said Terri.

  Cammie narrowed her eyes and peered at me. “So you think…”

  I shrugged. “There was a woman here who seemed to hate Daniel. Her husband died from the Agent Orange. Galinski.”

  “She was pretty drunk,” said Cammie.

  “I’m just trying to figure out who’d want to kill him.”

  Cammie nodded. “Me, too. But his army buddies? After all they went through together?”

  I nodded. “I know.”

  We stared into the darkness for a while. I thought of all the Vietnam vets I knew. Several of them had tried to tell me about the horror they carried around in their heads. I knew that those of us who hadn’t been here could never understand.

  “Look,” said Cammie after several minutes. “I hate to impose on you…”

  “No problem,” I said. “If you can put your hands on Daniel’s papers, I’ll try to sort it out for you.”

  “I don’t exactly know what he had,” she said. “Or even where he kept it. I guess we should check his office.”

  “At the shop?”

  She nodded.

  The three of us walked around the house to the shop. Cammie unlocked the door and we stepped inside. I found the light switch. It looked exactly as it had the morning we found Daniel’s body there, minus the body. The large oval bloodstain was still there, black and dull. The blurry outline of a man’s body was visible in the middle of it.

  I heard Terri exhale quickly.

  “I guess I should get in here and clean up sometime,” said Cammie. “But I just…”

  Terri put her arm around Cammie’s shoulder.

  We stepped gingerly around the bloodstain to the door that led to Daniel’s office. It stood ajar. I pushed it open.

  It was a small square room, ten by ten, no bigger. One small window. There was a desk and a file cabinet and a swivel chair. An old Underwood typewriter sat on the desk. The drawers of the desk and the cabinet hung open. Papers were scattered over the floor. It had been torn apart, all right, just as the police had said.

  “Let’s see what we’ve got,” I said.

  The three of us got down on our knees and gathered the papers together. They were all business records—bills, accounts, inventories, catalogs, tax records. I sorted through them and made a pile of the stuff that I might need to probate Daniel’s estate.

  “Is there anything missing?” I said to Cammie after we finished.

  She shrugged. “I couldn’t tell you. I never came in here. I didn’t know anything about his business. Just that I assumed he lost money at it. This,” she said, waving her hand around the little room, “was his little sanctuary. It’s where he came when he was writing his book.”

  “He never showed it to you, huh?”

  “He was very secretive about that book. He worked on it for, I don’t know, three or four years. He’d sneak down here and wouldn’t tell me why for the longest time. I’d tell him, I’d say, “You meeting some girl or something?’ And he’d give me that old smile and say, ‘Nay, lass. No girl.’ But he wouldn’t say what it was. Daniel was a secretive man anyway, but I kept bugging him, and finally he admitted he was trying to write a book. I asked him what it was about. He told me not to ask. He made it clear. It was none of my business. So I didn’t ask. I just knew that it was important to him and he didn’t want anybody to know about it. I think it would be neat if Daniel’s book got published.”

  I nodded. I realized that Daniel’s murder had driven thoughts of his book from my mind. “I’ll check with Al Coleman again, see what the holdup is. He said he was sending it right back, and that was over a month ago. There are plenty of other agents. But meanwhile, there’s got to be insurance records, a will, deeds, things like that that I’ll need. None of that stuff’s here.”

  Cammie snapped her fingers. “He kept a strongbox in his bedroom closet. That’s probably what you want.”

  We locked up the shop and went back to the house. A couple of minutes later Cammie placed a cheap metal box on the kitchen table. It wasn’t locked. Inside I found several manila envelopes. Daniel had carefully labeled each of them with a black felt-tip pen. “Deed.” “Will.” “Automobile.” “Medical.” “Business.” “Tax.” “Insurance.”

  None, I noticed, was labeled “Book.”

  I decided to take the whole box with me. I could look through all of it later.

  Then Cammie switched on the floodlights that lit up the yard, and Terri and I helped her fill plastic trash bags with beer cans and plastic glasses. There were hundreds of them—in the house, on the deck, in the gardens, all over the lawn, under the shrubbery. I told Terri that Daniel’s yard after the party was our world in microcosm. She told me I was unnecessarily cynical. I said I didn’t think so.

  Cammie insisted that Terri and I stay for supper. We made ham-and-Swiss-cheese-and-tomato sandwiches on whole wheat an
d washed them down with more beer. We had coffee on the deck.

  “What are you going to do?” Terri said to Cammie as we studied the night sky.

  “I don’t know. Nothing for a while. Paint.”

  “Going to stay here?”

  “For now.” She shrugged.

  “Will you be okay?”

  She smiled. “I’ve got my friends,” she said.

  Terri asked me to spend the night with her in Acton. I accepted. She slept pressed tight against my back with her arm draped over my hip, and I lay awake for a long time with her soft breath on the back of my neck, and I knew that just then neither of us was feeling any need for space.

  I also knew that that would change. It always did.

  Sunday evening I emptied the manila envelopes from Daniel’s strongbox onto my kitchen table and began to sort through their contents. He had everything well organized. It would be easy.

  He had bequeathed the house and the studio to Cammie. The shop and its contents went jointly to Brian Sweeney, Roscoe Pollard, and Vinnie Colletti.

  The last envelope I opened was the one labeled “Insurance.” It contained policies on his car and his buildings, plus a modest army policy on his life. The beneficiary was Cammie.

  Inside the big insurance envelope was a smaller envelope. I opened it and spilled its contents onto the table.

  Photographs. Six of them. Plus two index cards.

  The photos were five-by-seven black-and-white head-and-shoulder shots. Six men. On the back of each was printed a name and address. The printing did not match Daniel’s.

  Each of the two index cards had a name and address printed on it in Daniel’s hand.

  I looked at the photographs. All of them were creased and smudged and dog-eared, as if somebody had carried them around in his hip pocket for a while. I recognized none of the faces. None of the names meant anything to me.

  Friends of Daniel? Distant cousins? War buddies? Agent Orange victims? Debtors or creditors?

  Enemies?

  I couldn’t recall seeing any of the faces at Daniel’s funeral party. The photos showed six adult white males, all in some stage of middle age. None was particularly distinctive.