Bitch Creek

by Tapply, William

  He recounted his conversations with Penny Moulton and Sheriff Dickman. “I don’t know what else to tell you,” he said. “I guess if something happened to him, the sheriff would know it.”

  “That’s a comfort,” she said. She shook her head. “I’ve been looking back through the log, trying to figure where Lyle might’ve gone yesterday.”

  “He said he was heading for someplace that Mr. Green knew of. Someplace new for him.”

  She sighed. “I know. It was just a thought.”

  “All we can do is wait,” said Calhoun.

  She looked up at him and smiled. “You know,” she said, “I can sit for hours beside a stream and wait for the mayflies to start hatching and the trout to rise, and I don’t have any trouble waiting for the tide to turn and the stripers to move up onto the mussel beds. Some things, I’m pretty damn excellent at waiting for. But I have a good deal of trouble waiting for a boy to show up when I just know goddam well something bad’s happened to him.” She shook her head. “What’re we gonna do, Stoney?”

  “Nothing we can do,” he said.

  Calhoun spent most of the morning taking inventory while Kate did some ordering on the phone. Every time somebody pulled into the parking area out front, Kate twisted around and peered out the window. Then she turned, looked at Calhoun, and shook her head.

  A few customers came in, poked around, bragged about their angling prowess, tried to weasel secrets out of the shopkeepers, bought some flies.

  At noon, Calhoun got into his truck and drove over to the new Thai restaurant at the mall for takeout, that spicy noodley stuff with baby shrimp and hunks of chicken that Kate liked. They ate it with chopsticks and washed it down with Coke, sitting on the front porch outside the shop.

  Kate had a half-day guide trip in the afternoon. Her clients—a father and his twelve-year-old son who’d driven over from Rochester, New Hampshire—showed up around one-thirty. Neither of them had ever caught a striped bass before. This was the boy’s birthday present. They were bubbling with eagerness, the father as much as the boy, and Kate put on a good show of enthusiasm, though Calhoun could tell that she was still preoccupied with Lyle.

  He helped her get her trailer hitched up and her Blazer loaded with gear. The man, who turned out to be a plumbing contractor, climbed into the passenger seat, and the boy crawled in back.

  Kate got behind the wheel and rolled down the window. “Don’t wait around, Stoney,” she said. “I plan to keep these fellas out through the bottom of the tide, see if we can’t hang a keeper for the birthday boy.”

  “Tide doesn’t turn till, what, after eight?”

  She nodded. “It’ll be late. Close up at six and get on home and feed Ralph.”

  “I’ll leave you a note if I hear anything.”

  “I know you will,” she said.

  He stood there as she pulled away, the Blazer belching smoke and sounding like a motorcycle. Got to fix that damn tailpipe, he thought, before she gets a ticket.

  Around five o’clock Calhoun heard a car pull into the lot. He glanced out the window and saw a green Ford Explorer with a light bar on top and the York County Sheriff’s Department logo on the door.

  A moment later Sheriff Dickman came in. “Happened to be in the neighborhood,” he said. He was a short, barrel-chested guy with twinkling eyes and a sly leprechaun grin. The sheriff was close to sixty, but Calhoun knew he had the vitality of a man half his age. He wore khaki pants and matching shirt, a Stetson on his head, a badge on his chest, and a revolver on his hip.

  “Hear something?” said Calhoun.

  “Nope. Wondering if you did.”

  “Nope,” said Calhoun. “Coke?”

  “Sure,” said Dickman. “Let’s sit outside so I can keep an ear on the radio.”

  They sat on the porch. The radio in the Explorer squawked and buzzed through the open window. Dickman took off his hat and hung it on his knee. He smoothed his hand over his balding head and said he’d alerted everyone in his department, plus his counterparts up in Cumberland and Oxford counties and the state police, to be on the lookout for a gray-and-rust ’63 Dodge Power Wagon that might’ve been in an accident, and he’d had one of his deputies call the hospitals. So far, nothing.

  “Maybe you’d want to call his house again,” said Dickman.

  “No harm in that, I guess,” said Calhoun.

  He went inside, got the portable phone, brought it out on the porch, and dialed the number for Lyle’s house. This time a young man named Danny answered. Nobody had seen or heard from Lyle, as far as he knew, and Danny had been there all day.

  When Calhoun disconnected, he turned to the sheriff and shook his head. “He hasn’t been home, and he hasn’t been here,” he said. “Something’s definitely happened to him.”

  The sheriff shrugged. “I expect you’re right. Don’t know what else we can do. Something’ll turn up.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” said Calhoun.

  Darkness had fallen by the time he pulled into his dooryard that night. He fed Ralph and heated a can of beans for himself, tuned his stereo to the classical music station out of Portland, and settled into his soft chair for an evening of reading. Ralph curled up on the floor beside him, strategically positioning himself so that Calhoun could dangle his arm over the side and absentmindedly scratch his ears.

  Shortly after he’d come to Maine, Calhoun had bought a thick American Lit college anthology at a yard sale. The book was nearly two thousand pages long. It began with the diaries and poems and sermons of the first settlers—John Smith and John Winthrop and Roger Williams, Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor, Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards. It ended with some stories by Ann Beattie and John Updike and Bernard Malamud.

  Calhoun was sure he’d read a lot of this stuff during the time of his life that was still fuzzy, all those years that he’d lived before he woke up in the hospital. He wanted to recapture it, to catch up on his education.

  He’d been doing it slowly and chronologically, dipping into the anthology now and then, skipping nothing, not even the sermons of those early fire-and-brimstone preachers, keeping his place marked with a matchbook, no more than one writer in an evening of reading. Most of them, he figured, he’d never read before. But once in a while he had a hit—a flash of recognition, a certain knowledge that he’d read, and probably studied, one of these writers before. Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis, Hemingway, Whitman. The excerpts in the anthology led him to the novels. He read as many of them as he could find at yard sales. He’d liked these writers before, he knew, and now he liked them all over again. Some of the Walt Whitman poems, he only needed to read the first few lines to be able to close his eyes and recite the rest.

  Now, after five years with the anthology, he’d read his way well into the twentieth century.

  Tonight it was a Katherine Anne Porter short story called “Maria Concepcion.” It sparked no memory flashes, but Calhoun rather liked it—liked Porter’s clear, no-nonsense writing, the complexity of her characters, the irony in the story. When he finished it, he closed the heavy book and put it on the table beside him, dangled his hand, and gave Ralph a scratch.

  He hadn’t noticed when the radio station switched from classical to jazz, which meant that it was sometime after midnight. Calhoun laid his head back and closed his eyes. He recognized Miles Davis on trumpet, Red Garland on piano, John Coltrane on tenor sax. Bluesy, moody music, more déjà vu that brought Calhoun a flood of memory fragments which he didn’t bother trying to sort out.

  The first thing he’d bought for his new house—as soon as he started sleeping inside—had been an expensive stereo system with top-of-the-line Bose speakers. Pretty ironic for a man who was completely deaf in one ear and could not really hear in stereo.

  He loved music, got a lot of those déjà vu rushes when he heard something from before. He wondered if he’d ever played an instrument. Figured he had. He expected that one day he’d pick up a saxophone or guitar or
sit down at a piano and music would come bursting out of his fingers. Things kept happening to him that way.

  That’s how it had been the first time he’d picked up a fly rod after the hospital, and the first time he’d sat down to tie a fly. The memory was all there, in his brain and in his muscles, waiting to be let out.

  He resisted sleep, thinking about Maria Concepcion, trying to analyze the story, wondering who he’d known before that Maria reminded him of. But he must’ve drifted off, because he jerked up when Ralph scrambled to his feet, scuttled over to the door with his toenails scratching the floor, and barked.

  “Shut up, you,” said Calhoun mildly. Ralph barked whenever a coon or a porcupine wandered into the yard. His ears were considerably sharper than Calhoun’s.

  Then he heard the grumble of the busted tailpipe, growing louder, coming up his driveway, pulling in outside, falling suddenly silent. A car door slammed. Soft footsteps on the deck, the rattle of the doorknob, the click of the latch.

  Then Kate came in.

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  KATE USUALLY PUT ON MAKEUP and wore a dress and stockings and jewelry when she came in the night, but this time she had on the same shorts and T-shirt she’d been wearing that morning.

  It didn’t matter. Kate always looked great.

  Ralph’s entire hind end was wagging. Kate knelt down to scratch his ears. She looked up at Calhoun. “Evenin’, Stoney.”

  “Hi, honey,” said Calhoun. “You’re right on time.”

  Calhoun had started working for Kate Balaban a week after they met beside the tidal creek. At first he’d just waited on customers and tied flies in the shop, giving her a break and allowing her to guide clients occasionally. By September he was dickering with sales reps and building up the shop’s inventory of fly-fishing gear and studying for his Maine Guide license.

  Even during slack times or when they shared lunches on the porch, they talked only business. She never asked him where he had come from or why he seemed to be a man without a history, and he did not ask about her marriage.

  Within a month, he realized he loved her. He tried not to dwell on it. Kate was married, and that was that.

  She’d appeared at Calhoun’s house for the first time one evening in early October following that first summer. He had a fire going in the woodstove and a Bach organ fugue was playing loud on his stereo when he heard a car door slam out in the dooryard.

  He got up from his chair, took down the 12-gauge Remington autoloader from its pegs beside the door, switched on the floodlights, and went out onto the porch.

  Kate was climbing out of her Blazer. She made a visor with her hand and squinted up at him. “You’re not gonna shoot me, are you?”

  “I was thinking of it,” he said.

  She was wearing an ankle-length white dress with a scooped neck and sandals with thin leather straps decorated with silver studs. Silver earrings dangled from her ears and a big leather bag hung on her shoulder. He had never before seen her in anything except jeans or shorts and T-shirts or men’s flannel shirts. He liked how she looked in shorts. In a dress, she was just spectacular, and he stood there staring at her.

  “Are you going ask me in,” she said, “or are you just going to stand there with your face hanging out?”

  “Come on in, I guess.”

  He held the door for her. She stood inside the doorway, and Calhoun saw his place as she probably did—the comfortable, messy home of a single man, one big open room with dirty dishes piled in the sink, walls hung with fishing and hunting prints, secondhand leather couch and chair, cheap braided rug on the pine-plank floor, fly-tying desk strewn with hackle necks and bucktails and scissors and bobbins, aluminum rod tubes stacked in one corner and a glass-fronted gun case in another, neoprene chest waders sprawled on the kitchen floor.

  He returned the shotgun to its pegs, then went over to the stereo and turned down the volume.

  “Place needs a dog,” Kate said.

  “I’ve been thinking of that,” he said.

  “Don’t suppose a girl might have a glass of whiskey?”

  He smiled. “I don’t keep liquor. Can’t drink.”

  She reached into her bag and took out a pint of Old Grandad. “All I need is the glass,” she said.

  He found a tumbler, rinsed it out, and put it on the round table in front of the big kitchen window. She sat down and poured a slug of bourbon. He sat across from her.

  She lifted her glass to him, held his eyes with hers for a moment, then took a sip. She wiped her mouth on the back of her wrist, then smiled. “I thought I had this all planned out,” she said softly.

  Calhoun just sat there looking at her.

  She took another sip. “Okay,” she said. “Here it is, Stoney. We’ve got to talk.”

  “Sure.”

  She stared at the tabletop, shaking her head. “Shit,” she mumbled. She looked up at him. “You aren’t making this easy.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

  “You could tell me I’m pretty.”

  He smiled. “Jesus, ma’am.” He shook his head. “Sometimes I wish I could drink. You suck the breath right out of me, and that’s the truth.”

  “Maybe I was mistaken, but I had the idea you might . . .” She took a sip from her glass, put it down, looked into it. “I guess I shouldn’t have come here,” she mumbled.

  “Why don’t you just spit it out,” said Calhoun.

  She looked up at him. “I’m trying, dammit.” She nodded. “Okay. I guess I was wondering if—if you were feeling . . .” She shook her head.

  “Feeling what, ma’am?”

  “I wondered if you liked me.”

  “Hell, of course I like you.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  He just looked at her.

  She laughed softly. “Stoney,” she said, “what I’m trying to say is, do you love me?”

  He shook his head. “Truthfully, I’m trying very hard not to, ma’am. But I’m not having much luck at it.” He smiled at her. “You know I love you.”

  She nodded. “Yes. I feel the same.” She took another sip from her glass, then gazed down into it. “And for Christ’s sake, will you stop calling me ‘ma’am’?”

  He nodded.

  She looked up at him. “How would you feel about us being lovers, Stoney?”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t say I wanted to make love with you,” she said softly. “I mean, I do. But that’s not it. I want you and me . . .”

  “I know what it means,” he said, “being lovers.”

  She cocked her head and held his eyes.

  “I don’t think so, Kate,” he said.

  She nodded. “Well, hell, that’s all right.” She let out a long breath, then lifted her glass and took a long swig. “I figured I might as well ask.”

  “You’re married,” he said.

  “Yes, I am.”

  He shook his head. “I’m not into adultery.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Believe me,” said Calhoun, “it’s not that I wouldn’t . . .”

  “Wouldn’t what?”

  He shrugged.

  She reached across the table and put her hand over his. “Listen to me, Stoney. They diagnosed Walter’s MS four years ago this coming January. He hasn’t touched me, or even hardly looked at me or said anything sweet, since that day. He resents my good health, resents the fact that I’m continuing to live my life, resents the shop. I’m not saying that I don’t understand, because I do. And it’s not that I don’t still love him. I do love him. But he’s stuck in that wheelchair just waiting to die, and I’m—”

  Calhoun was shaking his head. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Just because he’s sick and grouchy and you’re not getting along—”

  “What if I weren’t married?”

  “That’s a dumb question,” he said. “You’re about the most—the most beautiful, the smartest, the most desirable damn woman
I’ve ever known.”

  She smiled. “Can I tell you my idea, then?”

  “I guess so. Sure.”

  “Usually,” she said, “when a married woman has herself a—a lover—not her husband—everybody knows it except him. Everybody except the husband. They sneak around, and I suppose part of the excitement is that sneaking around, worrying about getting caught, worrying that the husband’s going to find out.” She shook her head. “I’m not into excitement, Stoney. At least not that kind. I love you and I want to be with you, and I don’t want it to be sneaky and dirty. I was hoping we could do it the other way around.”

  “Are you saying you want to ask Walter’s permission?”

  “No,” she said. “I just want to tell him. I want him to know. I want him to be the only one who knows. I want you to come over to the house, meet him, and I want the two of us to tell him we’re going to be lovers. I want to assure him that we’ll be lovers only here, in your house in the woods, and I want to assure him that nobody else will ever know about us.”

  “What if he says no?”

  “I’m not saying to ask him. We’ll tell him. You and I. It’s got to be the two of us. I just want to be sure he understands. I mean, if you want.”

  Calhoun frowned. “This sounds cruel, Kate. It sounds like torturing the poor guy.”

  “You don’t know Walter,” she said. “You don’t know how we are. He and I. We’ve always told each other the truth. It’s the only way. It’s how he’d want it.”

  “Then we ask him,” Calhoun said. “We don’t tell him. IfWalter says no, then it’s no.”

  Kate smiled. “I knew you’d say that. I guess if I didn’t know you’d say that, I wouldn’t . . . love you. Most men . . .”

  Calhoun squeezed her hand. “When do you want us to talk to Walter.”

  Her dark eyes were solemn. “Tomorrow after we close up. Okay?”

  “I’ve got one request,” said Calhoun.

  “What’s that?”

  “Don’t ever dress like that around the shop.”

  “I thought you liked how I look.”

  “I do, ma’am. That’s just it.”