Dead Meat

by William G. Tapply

  “Not his wife?” I said.

  Marge shrugged. “Evidently he lived with his brother. Guess he wasn’t married. Look. Why don’t I go and get us a beer?”

  “Sounds good.”

  She was back in a minute with two cans of Budweiser. She handed one to me. “Gimme one of those cigarettes, will you?”

  I lit one of my Winstons and handed it to her. She took a big drag. “I keep quitting. But I do love them. Anyway, Mr. Rolando’s brother’s coming up. Tiny doesn’t know what to expect. He’ll want to talk to you about liability, I suspect.”

  “Have you given up on Rolando?”

  “Well, no, I haven’t. Of course, he wasn’t here long enough for anyone to figure out how resourceful he was. This was his first time. But this time of year, hell, the woods are full of nice fresh water. The nights aren’t all that cold. Take a man a long time to starve to death. If he’s got sense enough to find running water and follow it downstream, he’s pretty likely to come to something.” She tipped up her beer can and drank deeply. “Tiny, of course, he’s imagining the worst.”

  “The worst?”

  “Mr. Rolando’s down at the bottom of the lake somewhere. Or he’s lying in a gully with a broken leg. You know Tiny.”

  “Isn’t there anything somebody can do?”

  She shrugged. “It’s up to the sheriff, I guess.”

  A woman’s voice from behind us said, “Hey, Ma? Can you—?”

  Marge answered sharply without turning around. “Excuse me?”

  The last time I had seen Polly Wheeler was three years earlier, when she was a coltish girl-child of fourteen, all jutting hipbones, knee knobs, and flipping pony tail. Now she was a woman. She was seventeen or eighteen, I knew, but she could have passed for twenty-two or even older. Her honey-colored hair was cut into a short wedge, giving flattering emphasis to the angles and shadows formed by the delicate bones of her face—high, sharp cheekbones, long, straight nose, pointed chin. Her snug white jeans revealed that her hipbones no longer jutted. Polly wore a yellow T-shirt with “Maine Black Bears” printed on it. She wore no bra underneath.

  She moved beside Marge’s chair. She moved, I noticed, very gracefully. “Excuse me, mother,” she said, a sarcastic edge to her voice. “Bud needs an idea how many for dinner.”

  “Aren’t you going to say hello to Brady?”

  The girl frowned at me. “I don’t…”

  I held out my hand to her. “Brady Coyne. You don’t remember me. That’s all right. It’s been three years, at least.”

  She took my hand. “I’m Polly.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Well, at least you didn’t say how much I’ve grown since the last time you saw me.” She turned to Marge. “Anyway, Bud wants to know.”

  “Tell him the usual plus Gib and Brady.”

  “You guys want another beer?”

  “We’ll be in in a minute. Tell your father Brady’s here if you see him.”

  When Polly left, I said to Marge, “She has grown since the last time I saw her.”

  Marge laughed quickly. “Little Polly is a pregnancy waiting to happen. As maybe you noticed. Can’t wear clothes tight enough to satisfy her. I think she practices walking in front of a mirror, make sure her butt wiggles just right. She drives the guides nuts, I can tell. Some of the guests, too. I’m not sure that fancy private school was such a good idea. Oh, well. She’s off to college in September. She’s her own woman, I guess. Hope to hell she’s on the Pill.”

  “I would have to say that she’s probably the second sexiest lady at Raven Lake,” I said.

  “I know a compliment when I hear one,” she said. “And I also know when it’s time to change the subject. Come on. Let’s go in and get a real drink.”

  The downstairs of the lodge was one enormous room, half lounge and half dining room. The lounge half was dominated by a big fieldstone fireplace where a fire was blazing away. A well-stocked L-shaped bar stood in one corner. A variety of easy chairs, sofas, and Brumby rockers were scattered among the several large braided rugs. A wide central stairway leading to the bedrooms upstairs separated the lounge from the dining room. The walls were hung with mounted heads and fish—moose and deer with big racks, a bear, lake trout and squaretails and salmon of trophy size.

  Tiny had once told me that he didn’t find the taxidermist’s work especially attractive, but he felt that he had to decorate the lodge to fulfill the guests’ expectations. “They want rustic, see?” he said. “Wide plank pine floors. Log walls. Fieldstone fireplaces. Stuffed heads. That’s why we don’t run electric lights to the cabins and why we keep the outhouses. The sports want it that way. Give them televisions and running hot water, they’d think they were getting gypped. They pay seventeen fifty a week, they want wilderness. Go home to the city and talk about how they roughed it. Wild animals, all that shit. Of course, they want their booze, they want Bud’s fancy cooking, they want the guides to pamper them. So we give them what they want. We got electricity here in the lodge. Plumbing, too. This is where we live.”

  Marge took my hand and led me toward the bar. “I’ve got to play hostess, here,” she said. “Want me to introduce you around?”

  “I’ll manage. Introduce me to a glass of bourbon.”

  Polly was behind the bar, pouring drinks. Three middle-aged men wearing L. L. Bean chamois shirts and chino pants that looked brand-new had hitched up stools and sat there with their elbows on the bar, keeping her company. I stood behind them, waiting to catch Polly’s attention. She had a way of tossing her hair and bending for things under the bar that was not going unnoticed.

  “You boys have any luck today?” she said to them as she plunked three bottles of beer onto the bar.

  “Not yet, honey,” said one. “But the night is young.”

  “Party in Cabin three tonight,” said another one to her. “You like to party?”

  Polly leveled an unsmiling gaze on them. “I love to party,” she said.

  “Hey, come on, you guys,” said the third man. “This is Tiny’s kid.”

  “No kid,” said Polly.

  “For sure,” said the first sport.

  “Hey, hi,” she said, seeing me for the first time. “Drink?”

  “Bourbon. Ice.”

  The three men at the bar turned their heads to look at me. I nodded at them. “Brady Coyne,” I said.

  They mumbled greetings. “Where you from, friend?” said the guy who was planning the party.

  “Boston.”

  “Hey! So are we. Small world.”

  “Boston’s a big city,” I observed.

  “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. Actually, I came here to get away from the city.”

  “Yeah, well we did, too.”

  “So,” I said, “if you’ll excuse me,” and I walked away from them, bearing my glass of bourbon. I looked around the room for Tiny. There were about twenty people in there by now. Some of them were guides I recognized from previous trips. There were two middle-aged women dressed in spanking new blue jeans that they appeared unaccustomed to wearing and one woman, not much older than Polly, who was clutching the arm of a tall guy with a prominent Adam’s apple. The rest were men. Marge was chatting with the young couple. I didn’t see Tiny.

  I wandered back out to the porch. Two men had taken the rocking chairs that Marge and I had used. I dragged a third chair over beside them, propped my feet up onto the rail, and lit a cigarette. I decided that I could happily spend a good part of my two weeks right there.

  “Right purty evenin’, ain’t she?” I said, using a poor imitation of a down-east twang.

  The man beside me turned to look at me. “By God, it’s you, Mr. Coyne! Tiny said you’d be comin’ up.” He turned to the other man. “This here’s Mr. Coyne from Boston. He lost the biggest damn salmon I ever seen few years ago.”

  “Poor guiding,” I said.

  “When they jump, you gotta go slack on ’em, else the
y come down on the leader and tear the fly out. Good guide puts you into the fish. Good fisherman don’t mess up once he’s hooked into ’em.” He held out his hand. “Real good to see you again.”

  The old Penobscot hadn’t aged since I first met him a dozen or more years earlier. He always looked ageless. His skin was the color of rich red clay. Two deep gullies arced down from each side of his great beak of a nose to bracket his mouth. His coal-black eyes glittered behind narrowed, slightly down-tilted lids. His thick, straight hair, which he pulled back into a short ponytail, was the color of storm clouds. He had broad shoulders, powerful forearms, and an otherwise skinny frame. He could paddle upstream all day without breaking a sweat. Woody might have been fifty. He might have been seventy-five.

  I shook his horny mitt. “Good to see you, Woody. Glad to know you haven’t gone to live in the city.”

  “All us Indians didn’t get rich,” he said. “’Sides, I’d go crazy anywheres else but here.”

  “You don’t have any room in your canoe, do you?”

  The old guide rubbed his seamed face with the palm of his hand. “I reckon. Mr. Schatz here is by himself. You come on out with us tomorrow, Mr. Coyne. They’re bitin’ faster’n blackflies, and that’s a fact.” He paused and grinned. “I must be keepin’ my manners up my asshole. Mr. Coyne, this here is Mr. Schatz. He’s from New Jersey.”

  I reached across Woody and shook the other man’s hand. “You’re keeping bad company, Mr. Schatz.”

  He grinned. “Don’t I know it. And it’s Frank, please.”

  I nodded. “Brady. You don’t mind if I join you?”

  “Fine with me. This old Indian doesn’t talk much. I could use the company.”

  “He hasn’t told you how he beats up bears?”

  “He did tell me that one,” said Schatz.

  “What about the time he lined up the partridge, the rabbit, and the whitetail and got all three with one shot?”

  “Well, hell, Mr. Coyne,” said Woody. “Now you went and told it. I was savin’ that one.”

  “Tell him the moose story, then,” I said.

  Woody turned to look at Frank Schatz. “This here is absolutely true, Mr. Schatz. See, I made camp up on the north shore of the lake. About this time of year, it was. Well, I woke up—pitch-black out, it was—and I heard the goddamnest thumpin’ goin’ on—”

  “I didn’t mean now,” I said, grinning at Woody. “I’ve heard it already. Have you seen Tiny around?”

  “Tiny had a couple fellas out this afternoon. Got in after we did, all covered with fish slime and gurry. I’m telling you, the lake’s paved with salmon, Mr. Coyne. Anyways, I haven’t seen Tiny since then.”

  Schatz stood up. “I’m going to get another drink. Tell me about the moose later, Woody. I promise to believe you.”

  He left, and Woody and I rocked in silence for a few minutes. The sun was setting behind the hills beyond the distant shore. The surface of the lake had smoothed over. It looked like a pale pink pane of glass.

  “That fella can’t fish,” declared Woody quietly. “He don’t even appear to like it much. I asked him, does he want to try one of the streams for trout, he says no, he’d just as soon lay around in the canoe. So we’ve been trollin’ for four days, now. Draggin’ streamer flies up and down the shore. Catch a salmon now and then. Don’t seem to matter to him whether he catches one or not. Almost like somebody told him he had to come up here for a while, so he’s puttin’ in his time.”

  “Pretty expensive way to put in time,” I said.

  “We get them now and then,” said Woody. “Fellas come in here, usually alone, all they want to do is sit around the lodge, play poker, drink whiskey. Take ’em out on the lake, they fall asleep in the canoe. They get sick of it soon enough. Fly out after a few days of it. This Mr. Schatz is like that. Friendly enough. But, still, a strange bird.”

  “Who’s a strange bird?”

  The voice came from the doorway behind us. “Hey, Tiny!” I said.

  “By Jesus, Brady. It’s good to see you.” He came over and whacked my shoulder with his fist.

  Tiny perched on the railing facing me. He looked like an aging black bear balancing on a clothesline. His gold tooth glinted in a smile from the undergrowth of his gray beard.

  “How’s Doc and Charlie, anyways?” he said.

  “They’re good,” I answered. “Jealous as hell that I’m here and they’re not. Wanted to be remembered to you, both of ’em.”

  “You still gettin’ rich swindling folks like my brother?”

  “Still swindling them,” I said. “Still not rich enough, though.”

  “A man’s never rich enough. Look at Woody, here. Government give him half the state of Maine, he’s still trying to squeeze big tips from the city sports.” A beer can materialized in his big paw, and he drank from it and then wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “Damn,” he said, “I am glad to see you. Lots of things going on.”

  “So I understand. Marge filled me in a little.”

  He frowned. “That, and the Indians. Excuse me, Woody, but you know what I mean. You talk to Seelye Smith? Hell, we gonna lose this place, Brady?”

  “You want to talk about it now?” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”

  “You’re here for the fishin’, and don’t try to kid me. We can talk about it later. Let you get a couple drinks, dinner, into you first.”

  “What about your Mr. Rolando?” I said.

  He shook his head slowly. “I just don’t know. Nothing like this has ever happened up here before. Don’t make any sense at all. But he’s gone. Five days now. His brother’s coming up in a couple days. I dunno, Brady. If we don’t have something by then…”

  “You’re worried about liability.”

  “Hell, yes, I’m worried about liability. We get sued, Vern’ll have my ass on a platter.”

  “From what Marge told me, I don’t see how you’re liable, Tiny. But we can talk about that, too. When do we eat around here, anyway?”

  “That’s what I came out here for. Marge said to drag you in. Bud’s got baked lake trout and a roast. Nice smells in that kitchen.”

  Woody and I stood up. “We’ll talk some more later,” said Tiny as we followed him inside. “We got troubles here.”

  Tiny set a democratic table. Guides, guests, host, and hostess all ate together without regard for rank or status. I sat between Frank Schatz and the young man with the Adam’s apple, who told me he was an accountant named Fisher, up from Hartford on his honeymoon. His bride sat across from him and didn’t say a word during the entire meal. She kept her eyes on her plate except when Fisher spoke, at which time she lifted her gaze to him hopefully. He was, I gathered, an avid angler. He discoursed at length about the relative merits of boron and graphite in the manufacture of fly rods. He told me his strategies for fishing the spinner falls at the Henry’s Fork. I told him I had never been there, but it only spurred him on to more elaborately detailed treatises. I turned off my mental hearing aid when he switched topics to the advantages of custom-designed shooting heads for winter steelhead fishing in Oregon. His wife continued to listen raptly.

  At the other end of the table the guides were speculating on the fate of the missing Mr. Rolando. “Bears got ’im, sure’n hell,” one said.

  “I thought bears were timid,” said one of the party boys from Boston.

  “This time of year, a big ol’ mother bear with her cubs’ll take a man’s head clean off with one swipe of that big paw of hers. Nothing meaner’n a mamma bear in June.”

  “Catamount got ’im, you ask me,” chimed in another guide. “Folks say them big cats’re extinct, but I seen their tracks. They’ll jump outta trees, sink them old teeth into the back of a man’s neck. Your poor Mr. Rolando’s a goner, ’fraid.”

  The sports from Boston chuckled at this, but I sensed a nervous edge to their laughter. A glance at Tiny told me that he wasn’t enjoying the conversation a single bit.

  Lew Pike, who had
guided me on one of my earlier trips to Raven Lake, said, “It ain’t the animals that got ’im. It’s the Injuns. Hell, everybody knows there’s only one thing Indians like better’n findin’ a white man alone in the woods, and that’s findin’ a white woman. Peel their skin clean off, they will, in neat little strips, one at a time. Them squaws is worst of all. When the Indians want to do some serious torturin’, they leave it to their squaws. Ain’t that right, Woody?”

  Woody looked up from his plate. “That is so, Lew,” he said mildly. “Learned all about it from the white man.”

  Between the bantering from that end of the table and the pontificating of young Mr. Fisher, there was no call for me to fabricate small talk. Which suited me fine. Bud Turner had performed his customary miracle—baked lake trout steaks with a sharp white sauce, roast beef with popovers and smooth brown gravy, baby baked potatoes, red kidney beans, fresh bread, and pitchers of cold milk and ice water.

  I ate it all with great appetite and kept my silence. Diagonally across from me, Polly sat beside Gib. They seemed to have their own conversation going. At the head of the long rectangular table Tiny reigned, trying, it seemed to me, to keep tabs on all the conversations at once. At the other end sat Marge, a bemused smile on her face. Once when I glanced her way, she caught my eye and winked wickedly.

  After dinner I went into the kitchen. Polly and Bud Turner were working side by side at the big double sink, scraping off plates and loading up the dishwasher.

  “Hey, Bud,” I called.

  Turner turned around. “Hey, there, Mr. Coyne. How you doin’?”

  The Raven Lake cook was a gaunt man a few years younger than me. He was losing his sandy hair rapidly. His beaky nose and hollowed cheeks looked more fitting on a prisoner of war than on a talented chef.

  He dried his hands on a towel and stalked across the kitchen. He thrust his bony hand at me, and I shook it. “Good to see you,” I said. “Another culinary masterpiece tonight.”