Gray Ghost

by William G. Tapply

  “I was pretty nice to him. He wanted to take a break right in the middle of a good blitz. Said he needed to stretch his legs and take a leak, and I hardly argued with him.”

  “You stopped fishing in the middle of a blitz?”

  “Just trying to keep the client happy,” said Calhoun.

  Kate was shaking her head. “You know, sometimes—”

  “Mr. Vecchio caught the biggest striper of his life,” he said. “Big old cow, thirty-eight inches on my tape. She was lurking under a bunch of stripers and blues that were blitzing on peanut bunker, and she ate Mr. Vecchio’s Clouser when he let it sink down to her. He seemed pretty happy about it, actually.”

  “And then you quit fishing?”

  “You better talk to the sheriff about that,” said Calhoun.

  She turned and looked at him. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Mr. Vecchio stumbled on a dead body out on Quarantine Island, honey, and Sheriff Dickman insisted I haul him out there so he could take a look at it.”

  Kate pulled her head back and looked at Calhoun. “This another one of your stories, Stoney?”

  He smiled. “Nope.”

  “You gonna tell me about it?”

  “Not now,” he said. “It’s a pretty long story, and right now I gotta go hose out my boat. Why don’t you come over tonight, I’ll grill us a steak and tell you all about it.”

  “Maybe I will, maybe I won’t,” she said. “And I told you a million times. Don’t call me honey at the shop.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Kate was shaking her head. “You are a hard man to love, Stoney Calhoun.”

  “Nothing’s worth much,” he said, “if it comes too easy.”

  Kate rolled her eyes.

  “I’ll thaw a couple steaks,” said Calhoun, “just in case.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Darkness had seeped into the piney woods that surrounded Calhoun’s cabin. He was sitting on the deck listening to his little trout stream out back gurgle over its gravel bed and swirl and burble against the granite abutments of the old burned-out bridge. A few bats were darting around snatching leftover summer mosquitoes out of the air. The almost-full moon was orange behind some drifting clouds. The barred owls were calling to each other.

  Calhoun was slouched in one of his Adirondack chairs with his feet up on the railing, sipping a mug of coffee. He was wearing a fleece jacket against the evening chill. Ralph was sprawled on the deck beside him, snoring softly after another busy day.

  Calhoun was waiting for Kate to show up. He hoped she would. Sometimes she did, sometimes she didn’t. She never promised, and he knew better than to get his hopes up too high. They had an arrangement that most folks would consider peculiar, if not downright weird.

  In the first place, Kate was married to a man named Walter, and in their own way, Kate and Walter loved each other.

  Kate was not the kind of woman to cheat, nor was Calhoun the kind of man who’d sneak around with a married woman, no matter how much he loved her.

  Walter had multiple sclerosis. He’d been in a wheelchair for several years. Nobody with this disease ever got better. Sometimes they stayed about the same for a long time, but sooner or later they got worse and worse until they died. Walter knew this, and he wasn’t particularly philosophical about it.

  When Calhoun realized he loved Kate—it happened within an hour of when he first met her—he tried to ignore it. Married was married, and that was that, as far as he was concerned.

  To Calhoun’s amazement and confusion, though, pretty soon Kate confessed that she loved him right back. Calhoun said they had to just forget it, but Kate said she was going to talk to Walter about it whether Calhoun approved or not.

  He didn’t approve, but he knew that wouldn’t stop Kate. So he insisted that he should be there when she did it.

  Walter had been relieved. As embittered and disabled as he was, he loved Kate enough to want her to have a happy and full life, and when he decided that he liked and respected Stoney Calhoun, he encouraged the two of them to go ahead and love each other completely.

  Calhoun and Kate said they’d try to keep it private. Walter said you couldn’t carry that off forever. Sooner or later, people would get wind of it. His only request was that when they did, they should know that whatever Calhoun and Kate were doing, they were doing it with Walter’s knowledge and approval.

  So some evenings after she got Walter settled for the night, Kate came to Calhoun’s cabin. They ate and talked and laughed and listened to music and made love.

  Sometimes she stayed for the whole night, and in the morning they had coffee on the deck and walked in the woods.

  Sometimes she could only stay for an hour or two. Calhoun was grateful for every minute.

  And sometimes when he was expecting her and feeling like he’d explode if he couldn’t touch her skin and smell her hair and taste her mouth, she didn’t show up at all.

  He tried never to expect her. He tried to be surprised every time her Toyota truck came bumping down his long driveway with its tailgate rattling, and not to be disappointed when it didn’t happen. If you had no expectations, you could never be disappointed.

  But as far as Stoney Calhoun was concerned, any night that Kate wasn’t there was a disappointing night.

  He’d rubbed two thick New York strip steaks with kosher salt and fresh-ground pepper and a little rosemary. He’d parboiled a handful of golf-ball-sized red potatoes, slathered them with olive oil, and wrapped them in tinfoil. He’d shredded some lettuce into a wooden bowl, and he’d sliced a cucumber and a tomato and a red onion on top of the lettuce. He’d fired up the grill so the coals could burn down to white embers. He’d found an NPR station that played jazz and blues all night long, and he’d opened the kitchen windows so the music could spill out onto the deck.

  And he sat there sipping his coffee and waiting for Kate.

  About seven years earlier, Stonewall Jackson Calhoun had been an entirely different man. The present Stoney Calhoun, the man who lived by himself in a two-room house he and his friend Lyle had built in the woods in the township of Dublin, Maine, the man who was a half-and-half partner with Kate Balaban in a struggling fly shop and guide service in Portland, the man who loved exactly one person in the entire world—it used to be two before young Lyle got murdered—this Stoney Calhoun had no memories of the previous Calhoun. They were utter strangers to each other.

  The only knowledge Calhoun had of his previous self had been told to him by the therapists in the VA hospital, and he wasn’t sure they necessarily told him the truth.

  They said he’d been hit by lightning, and he did have a jagged red scar on his left shoulder that seemed to prove it. The lightning had put him into a monthlong coma. It erased his memory, they said, just the way a sudden jolt of electricity would erase everything from the hard drive of a computer. It made him deaf in his left ear, and it messed up his brain’s chemistry, leaving him absolutely intolerant of alcohol, neither of which he found to be much of a handicap. He had a perfectly fine right ear, and Coke and coffee gave him as much chemical stimulation as he wanted.

  Now and then the Man in the Suit—a grayish, nondescript guy from some government agency who’d been sent to keep an eye on him—came to find out what Calhoun might have remembered from his previous life, and he always seemed relieved, if a bit skeptical, when Calhoun told him that he remembered nothing.

  The Man in the Suit liked to bribe and tease Calhoun with fragments of information about where he’d come from and what kind of man he used to be. Calhoun was naturally curious about it, but he tried not to reveal that to the Man in the Suit.

  To Stoney Calhoun, his previous self was an abstraction. It interested him, but it was about somebody else.

  Calhoun understood that his dreams and nightmares resurrected images from his other life. Mostly they were weirdly distorted and utterly terrifying. And sometimes a word or an aroma or a snatch of music would trigger a f
amiliar image or a remembered emotion so powerful that he would have to sit down, close his eyes, and take a deep breath.

  The first time he picked up a fly rod after coming to Maine, Calhoun understood that he used to be a good caster. The timing, the rhythm of it, the feel of the line in his hand and the flex of the rod in his wrist, it was all still there, imbedded in his muscle memory. He discovered he could shoot a shotgun and back a trailered boat down a ramp and repair an outboard motor and sneak up on a deer in the woods and tie a perfect fly and understand the grain on a hunk of firewood so he could split it with one easy whack of his splitting maul.

  He could read and write, add and subtract. He could translate French.

  He knew how to use tools. He could lay pipe and string wire. He built his own house in the woods. For all he knew he could play the cello or the clarinet. Someday he’d have one in his hands, and then he’d know. He kept learning things like that about himself.

  He remembered everything from the time he woke up in that hospital in Virginia. His brain was littered with images. They were vivid and specific, and he could sort through them and find what he was looking for, and then he could study them and see all their details. He could sketch a man’s face from the image in his memory, and what he drew would look just like the picture in his head.

  He’d also discovered that he knew how to hurt people with his hands, and that it didn’t bother him when he had to do it.

  When he came to Maine, Stoney Calhoun devoured a thick anthology of American literature, in the naive hope that the stories and poems and essays would help him stitch his past together. In fact he knew he’d read a lot of it before. Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Frost, Hemingway, Poe. When he read them, it was as if he knew what they were going to say before he read it.

  Still, it didn’t add up. All the stories and all those dream images and elusive snatches of memory and flashes of déjà vu filled up his brain, but they didn’t give him a past.

  Stonewall Jackson Calhoun had been born in that VA hospital seven years ago. When he left, he was a thirty-two-year-old man starting all over again.

  Now he had just the past seven years of actual memories. He remembered every fish he’d caught, every conversation he’d had, every face he’d seen, every birdsong he’d heard.

  Now he could sit out on his deck waiting for Kate to show up on a September evening and relive the first time they had made love. He could spin it out in real time, every word they’d spoken, every murmur and laugh and quick intake of breath, the scent of her hair, the taste of her skin, the soft scratch of her fingernails on his back, the nip of her teeth, the power of her legs wrapped around his hips, the way her tongue outlined the scar on his shoulder.

  He could relive not just that first time, but every time since that first one, too.

  Now, as if to make up for those lost thirty-two years, the most recent seven years filled his brain. He remembered everything and forgot nothing.

  He hadn’t yet figured out whether it was a blessing or a curse.

  It was close to midnight when Calhoun reached down, scratched Ralph’s ears, and said, “Well, she ain’t coming tonight.”

  He went inside, opened the refrigerator, found one of the ham-and-cheese sandwiches he’d made for Mr. Vecchio that morning, and ate it over the sink.

  He wrapped the steaks and potatoes in tinfoil, dumped the salad into a plastic bag, and put them into the refrigerator. He loaded the electric coffeepot for the morning. He went out onto the deck and peed off the side. Then he went to bed.

  At dawn the next morning, Calhoun and Ralph were sitting on some boulders beside Bitch Creek where it curled out of the woods, flowed under the burned-out bridge, and spread into a curving pool against the slope behind the cabin.

  Ralph was staring at a trout that was eating tiny mayflies in the eddy behind a rock right next to where they were sitting. The trout’s flanks were orange, and its spots were as crimson as fresh drops of blood. The fish wasn’t more than six or seven inches long, but it was full of spunk and aggression, ready and eager to spawn. Calhoun thought it was a treasure, this little native brook trout living and reproducing here in the little stream behind his cabin in the Maine woods. It was descended from the trout that were left behind when the glaciers receded eons ago. It was some kind of miracle.

  A little over a year ago Stoney Calhoun had come here with Kate and Ralph bearing the urn that held Lyle McMahan’s ashes. Lyle was just twenty-six, a graduate student at the university and a top-notch fishing and hunting guide. It was Lyle who’d told Calhoun about Quarantine Island. One June day he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and a man named Ross shot him dead. He was Calhoun’s best friend—except for Kate and Sheriff Dickman, his only friend—and Calhoun still hadn’t been able to talk himself out of the guilt he felt for placing Lyle in that wrong place. Lyle had no family, which was why Calhoun got his remains.

  At sunrise on a misty June morning they emptied the urn into Bitch Creek, said good-bye and God speed, and watched Lyle’s ashes swirl in the currents. Calhoun liked to think that some part of his friend sank to the bottom and remained there in the pool just downstream from the old bridge abutments, living in eternal harmony with the native brook trout, while some of him drifted down the network of streams and rivers all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. These were places that Lyle knew and understood and loved.

  Whenever he felt confused or sad or just contemplative, Calhoun would take Ralph down to their creek and sit on a rock and think about Lyle. He supposed it was just his imagination, or wishful thinking, but sometimes he was certain that he heard Lyle’s voice forgiving him, and it comforted him.

  Calhoun’s coffee mug was empty, and he was thinking of heading back to the cabin for a refill when he heard the whine of an engine in low gear coming down his rutted driveway. He sorted through his memory file of sounds and recognized the pitch of that particular engine. It was Sheriff Dickman’s green Explorer.

  The engine sound got louder, then died, and a minute later the sheriff was standing at the top of the slope shading his eyes with his hand and peering down at Calhoun and Ralph.

  Calhoun waved, then stood up. “Pour yourself some coffee,” he said. “I’ll meet you on the deck.”

  Ralph went scrambling up the slope. Calhoun trudged along behind him. By the time he got to the house, Sheriff Dickman was lounging in one of the Adirondack chairs with a coffee mug sitting on the arm. He was wearing his tan-colored uniform. His flat-brimmed hat sat on the table, and Ralph was sprawled on the deck beside him.

  “Mornin’,” Calhoun said.

  “Mornin’, Stoney,” said the sheriff.

  “I don’t suppose this is a social call.”

  The sheriff gave his head a small shake. “I’m afraid it’s not.”

  Calhoun nodded. “Be right with you.” He went into the kitchen, refilled his mug, took it out to the deck, and sat in the other chair. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s have it. You identify that body?”

  “Nope. He was burned, as they say, beyond recognition.” The sheriff blew out a breath. “His face was nothing but charcoal. Didn’t have any fingers left to give us prints.”

  “There must be some missing persons in your files you could match him up with,” said Calhoun. “Dental records or something.”

  “No grown men’ve been reported missing in the past couple weeks,” said the sheriff.

  “He could be from somewheres else,” said Calhoun, “not local. Or he could’ve been missing for a year.”

  “You’re right, Stoney. Point is, we don’t know who he is.” The sheriff took a sip of his coffee. “That new county ME—that’s the lady doctor, Dr. Surry, the redhead—she estimates the poor bastard’s been dead between a week and ten days.”

  “When you come up with suspects,” said Calhoun, “you’re going to have a tough time with their alibis. That’s a big difference’ anytime between a week and ten days. That’s a lot of time to account for.”

>   The sheriff nodded. “First thing is to identify him, and we’re kinda stymied there, unless we can come up with some dental records to compare this man’s mouth to.”

  Calhoun watched the sheriff as he talked. He noticed that his friend’s knee was jiggling, and he was staring off toward the pine woods behind Calhoun’s house, not making eye contact.

  “The doctor notice anything else?” said Calhoun.

  The sheriff nodded, still gazing off into the distance. He didn’t say anything for a minute. Then he turned to Calhoun. “His hands and feet had been bound with duct tape. His throat had been sliced from ear to ear.”

  “Doesn’t sound like somebody setting himself afire to make a political point,” said Calhoun.

  “Nope,” said the sheriff. “Not hardly.” He hesitated. “There was something else, too.”

  Calhoun waited.

  The sheriff cleared his throat. “His, um, his penis was cut off, Stoney, and it was stuffed into his mouth.”

  “Jesus,” said Calhoun.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well,” said Calhoun, “I’m sure glad you came all the way out here to tell me these things, Sheriff. Cheerful as hell. Gets my day off on the right foot, all right.”

  The sheriff shrugged. “I figured you’d want to know.”

  “Why?”

  The sheriff shook his head. “Tell me what you make of it, Stoney.”

  “Well, let’s see,” said Calhoun. “They take this man out to one of the farthest islands in Casco Bay all bound with duct tape, they execute him, they cut off his pecker and shove it in his mouth, and then they douse him with—what? Gasoline?”

  Dickman shrugged. “Not sure. Something like that.”

  “They soak him so thoroughly with gasoline,” Calhoun continued, “that when they touch a match to him, his clothes and face and fingers are burned away, which probably means they don’t want you to identify him. They set him up on the east side of the island so the fire can’t be seen from the mainland. Or maybe they didn’t do it at night. Either way, Quarantine Island is a place nobody has any reason to go to, so they didn’t want the body to be found right away.” He paused to get his thoughts straight. “Still, they’re trying to make some kind of statement.”