Dead Meat

by William G. Tapply

  “Aw, just a little somethin’ I threw together,” he said with a grin.

  “You haven’t lost your touch. The lake trout was special.”

  He chuckled. “They came out good, didn’t they?”

  “What was the flavor of the sauce? I couldn’t identify it.”

  “Herbs. Professional secret.”

  “I’d love to have your recipe.”

  “Sorry, Mr. Coyne. Maybe I’ll write a cookbook someday.”

  “You gotta learn to write first,” said Polly over her shoulder. “Come on. Cut the yakking and get back to work. I’m not going to do this all by myself.”

  Turner shrugged and grinned. “Boss’s daughter. Can’t goof off. Gotta go. See you around, huh? Maybe we’ll have a chance to wet a line together while you’re here.”

  “I’d like that,” I said.

  I wandered out onto the porch, found an empty Brumby, lit a cigarette, and stared out at the lake. A few minutes later Tiny eased himself into the chair beside me.

  “So,” he said, “tell me what the Indians are up to.”

  I summarized my conversation with Seelye Smith.

  “The burial ground, eh? That’s the key, then.”

  I shrugged. “Could be. That’s the threat. Sue on the basis of the burial ground if you won’t sell.”

  “Well, I sure as hell ain’t sellin’.”

  “It could turn out that selling would be smarter.”

  Tiny turned to look at me. “This place is my life,” he said. “What in hell would I do anywheres else?”

  I nodded. “Anyway, you’re in good hands. Seelye Smith comes highly recommended. I liked him. He’s smart and well connected. Nothing more you can do.”

  “That makes me feel a little better,” he said doubtfully. “Now, if Mr. Rolando would just come strolling up the path with a big grin on his face, itchin’ to tell us his adventures, I’d feel great.”

  “Maybe he will.”

  “Doubt it.”

  Tiny and I rocked for a while longer, staring out at the darkening lake and swatting an occasional mosquito. After a bit of that Tiny got up and wandered back inside.

  I decided to smoke another cigarette before I followed him.

  The Maine woods are filled with night sounds—the shrieks and calls of birds, the rustle of the breeze in pine boughs, the slapping of gentle waves against shore-bound rocks. Human sounds grate the attuned ear, and the hiss I heard, while not loud, caused me to tense my muscles. Because it was a secret sound, the whisper of connivers. I stopped rocking and squinted into the dusk. Two figures moved down the path away from me and toward the dock. They walked slowly. Their heads were cocked toward each other as they whispered.

  As they approached the dock, they came into full silhouette against the light reflected on the surface of the lake. I identified one of the men as Gib and the other as Frank Schatz. Both men carried what looked like duffel bags.

  I watched as Gib climbed up into his plane and Schatz handed the bags up to him. Then Gib came down again. He and Schatz then scurried quickly away from the plane and disappeared into the shadows of the trees.

  It took all of three minutes, all very innocent, and I wondered why I had tensed as I watched them. They had done nothing more suspicious than stow some stuff into the airplane.

  Had Kenneth Rolando not disappeared from this place, I knew I would not have given it a second thought. I was imagining plots and conspiracies. Probably, if the truth were known, I was hoping for a plot or a conspiracy, some spice for the humdrum life of a middle-aged attorney.

  Nuts, I told myself. Act your age, Coyne.

  My cigarette had burned down to the filter while I’d been staring at Gib and Schatz. I stomped on it and stood up. I peered into the darkness and tried to listen for more intrusive human sounds. There were none.

  I climbed the stairs to my room. After I got my things unpacked, I padded to the common bathroom at the end of the hall and took a leisurely hot bath, with a paperback edition of a John le Carré novel for company. By the time George Smiley had me thoroughly confused and the bath water had cooled down and I had toweled myself dry, it was after ten o’clock—late by Raven Lake standards.

  I pulled on a sweatshirt and old corduroys, slipped into my moccasins, and wandered downstairs. The big room was empty of people. I went outside. From the porch I could hear a soft breeze soughing in the tops of the evergreens. A half moon had risen. I walked down to the water’s edge and out onto the dock. The water slapped softly against the pilings. I sat on the edge, dangling my feet. I lit a cigarette and listened for the loons.

  The laughter of the loon never fails to stir something in me. It’s a long, eerie, hysterical wail, a primal shriek that reminds me of the sounds expected of professional mourners. It should properly be accompanied by the beating of breasts and the tearing of hair.

  But it’s just loon talk. It’s the sound they make. I suppose it doesn’t convey particularly morbid emotions to them. A way of saying, “Howdy, there,” or, “Lookin’ like rain,” probably. Whatever it means, it always thrills me.

  I sat there for about fifteen minutes before the loons finally rewarded me. There were two of them, far away up toward the northern end of the lake, and their cries came echoing across the water as they called and answered each other.

  “I brought you something.”

  I jerked around. “Jesus, Marge. You shouldn’t sneak up on a man like that.”

  In the night light I saw that she was holding out a glass to me. I took it. “Thanks. Pull up a seat.”

  She sat beside me, her shoulder touching mine. She had a glass of her own. “Let’s have a cigarette,” she said.

  We smoked and drank in silence. Marge was a comfortable sort of woman. Even though I hadn’t seen her for three years, I felt that I knew her well. “You want to talk?” I said.

  I felt her shiver. “No. Not really. I don’t mean to disturb your solitude.”

  “You’re not. There’s room for you in it.”

  “Thank you for that,” she said. She rested her head against my shoulder for a moment.

  We sat in silence, sipping our drinks. I thought of telling Marge that I had seen Gib and Schatz skulking around on the dock, loading up the Cessna. As I thought it, I realized how silly it seemed. So I said nothing about it.

  “So how’s the lawyerin’ business?” Marge said after a few minutes.

  “It’s a living,” I said with a shrug.

  “Come on.”

  “You’re right. That wasn’t fair. It’s a damn good living, is what it is. I help people out, and they give me lots of money. I come and go as I please. I owe nobody money—or anything else. I’ve got it knocked.”

  “But…?”

  I lit another cigarette. I took a deep drag and let the smoke ooze out of my nostrils in the way that used to drive Gloria, my former wife, absolutely crazy.

  “You look like a goddamn criminal when you squint your eyes and do that,” she’d scream at me. “You look like a rapist. You look like someone who’d mark people’s faces with knives. Cut it out.”

  Married people always know how to drive each other crazy. The mark of a successful marriage, I guess, is the restraint each partner shows. I rather liked letting smoke ooze and dribble from my nostrils. My marriage failed after about a dozen years. It follows.

  “But,” I said to Marge, “my kind of lawyering, however rewarding, however much good I can do for people, is about the most deadly boring occupation imaginable. I continue to do lawyering because a week of it buys me a week at a place like Raven Lake, and so far the quid has been worth the quo. But you know what?”

  She smiled up at me. “What?”

  “Hardly a day goes by that I don’t find myself wondering what I’m going to do when I grow up.”

  She touched my arm, squeezed gently, and then drew her hand away. It was a wonderfully intimate gesture. It conveyed perfect understanding and empathy. I could have repaid that gesture in kind o
nly by kissing her. I was briefly tempted.

  After a few minutes, the loons wailed again, and it occurred to me that 130 years ago Thoreau might have sat near this place on an evening such as this one, listening to the ancestors of these same loons. I found the possibility of such continuity comforting.

  “God, they’re spooky,” Marge murmured.

  “Mmm,” I said. “It’s territorial, I expect. They’re saying, ‘This is our place.’”

  “Well,” said Marge, “they’re right. We’re just visitors. They live here.”

  She hitched herself closer to me so that our thighs touched. I resisted the impulse to put my arm around the shoulders of Tiny’s wife. Instead, I shifted, moving a few inches away from her.

  Abruptly, she stood up. “Time to go in,” she said.

  She held out a hand to me and helped me up. I stood there for a minute, close to her, looking down into her face. Then I nodded. “Yes. Let’s go in.”

  Five

  I WAS BRUSHING MY teeth when I heard the voices. It sounded as if they were coming from the hallway just on the other side of the bathroom door.

  “Where have you been?” It was Marge, speaking in an angry whisper. The hard emphasis was on the word “you.”

  “Out.” Polly did not whisper.

  “Keep your voice down,” Marge hissed.

  “That’s easy. I have nothing to say.” But Polly did whisper, and her voice came through the bathroom door like a cold wind through the chinks in a drafty cabin.

  “You were with him again, weren’t you?”

  “Him?”

  “You know who I mean.”

  “No, Mother, I don’t. Tell me who you mean.”

  “Gib.”

  “No, I wasn’t with Gib.”

  “Well…”

  “I was with another man, actually. So what?”

  “If you wake up your father…”

  “Nothing wakes up my father. You can’t wake up my father.”

  I heard the unmistakable sound of flesh smacking flesh, and I had no trouble visualizing Marge’s slap against Polly’s cheek.

  “Well, now, Mother.” Polly laughed.

  “Don’t talk about things you don’t know.”

  Polly laughed again, a cruel bark.

  “You know how we feel about—about socializing with the guests.”

  “Socializing. Very nice, Mother. I like it. Socializing.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “No. Say what you mean.”

  “Twitching your ass at them. I mean—I mean flirting with them. I mean—”

  “You mean fucking them.”

  I didn’t want to be where I was, a captive of this conversation that I didn’t want to hear. I couldn’t just open the door, excuse myself, and pad barefoot to my room down the hall. I thought of flushing the toilet to let them know I was there, imprisoned in the bathroom. But it was too late for that. They would know that I’d already heard.

  So I dropped the lid on the toilet and sat down to wait it out.

  “Is that what you were doing?” Marge’s voice had lost its anger. It sounded sorrowful.

  “What if I was?”

  “Oh, Polly…”

  “Well? What if I was? Do we have rules about screwing the guests?”

  “Honey…”

  “How would you like it?” she said, her tone different now, a querulous little-girl voice. “How would you like to be me stuck up here? Nobody my age, no television. Not even a telephone.”

  “I understand, Polly. It’s only for the summer.”

  “It’s only for the summer,” Polly’s voice mocked. “Do you know how long a summer is? And what about you, Mother. Do the rules apply to you?”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “What were you doing down on the dock?”

  “Listen to me, little girl. What I was doing is none of your business.”

  “It works both ways.”

  “It does like hell.”

  “You got something going with Brady, Mother? Hey, he’s kinda sexy. Can’t blame you. Does Daddy know?”

  “That is enough.” Warning hissed in Marge’s tone.

  “I didn’t want this conversation in the first place.”

  “And it is ended. Just keep one thing in mind, dear daughter. If I catch you in the sack with one of the guests, I’ll…”

  There was a long pause. Then I heard Polly’s whisper, soft and mocking. “Yes? You’ll what? What will you do?”

  “Polly, honey…”

  “I want to know what you’ll do.”

  “Nothing. Never mind. Go to bed.”

  “Mother?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t worry. I won’t tell Daddy about Brady. This can be our secret. Isn’t it nice?”

  “Dammit, Polly!”

  “Our own little mother-daughter secret.” Polly laughed softly. I heard a door open and close, and a moment later another one. I waited a minute and then gathered up my things and tiptoed down the hall to my room. The floorboards creaked. The door to my room needed oil. And when I sat on my bed, I discovered that the bedsprings were noisy, too. So much for my efforts at discretion.

  I propped myself up in bed and opened my book. I tried to concentrate on George Smiley’s efforts to root out the mole in his Circus, but after I’d read three pages, I realized I hadn’t been paying attention.

  So I turned off the light and lay there in the dark, thinking about big salmon and smelling the moist piny aromas that wafted in through the open window of my room and listening to the night noises of the big Maine woods. I pondered only lightly the mysteries of parent-child relationships, but it was good enough. It put me to sleep.

  The whine of an engine woke me up. Gray light seeped in through the window, and under the distant din of the engine I could hear the slow, rhythmic patter of raindrops on the roof over my head. I climbed out of bed and went to the window. It wasn’t raining, but it had been, and the thick mist in the air had settled on the tall pines that arched over the lodge, gathering into droplets that then fell from their own weight onto the roof.

  I checked my watch. It was a few minutes before six. Late, for me. I tugged on my jeans, pulled on my sweatshirt, shoved my bare feet into my moccasins, and went downstairs.

  A fire roared in the big fireplace. The table had already been set for breakfast. I found an urn of coffee on a side table and poured myself a mugful. The sounds of voices and the clank and clatter of pots and pans came from the kitchen. I pushed open the door and was greeted by a powerfully evocative mix of aromas. Frying bacon and baking bread dominated.

  “Mornin’,” I called.

  Bud Turner and Polly and Marge, each at a separate station in the big kitchen, all turned, smiled, and greeted me. Whatever had been going on between mother and daughter the previous night, they seemed cheerful enough this morning. I wondered if what I had overheard was a nightly occurrence.

  I lifted my mug. “Glad to have this. When do we eat?”

  “Six-thirty,” said Bud. “How you want your eggs?”

  “Over easy.”

  “How many?”

  “That bread I smell?”

  “Biscuits. Bacon, sausage, fried spuds, mince pie, too.”

  “Two eggs, then. Want to save room for all the other good stuff.”

  I took my coffee out onto the porch just in time to see Gib’s Cessna begin to taxi through the mist away from the dock. When he got halfway across the lake, he turned and headed uplake. The whine of the engine increased its pitch, and as the plane accelerated, I could see it begin to bounce and skip across the ruffled surface of the water. It lifted, dropped, then lifted again, and this time it stayed up. I watched it climb and then bank around behind me until the forest at my back obscured it from my sight.

  I was sitting on the steps, watching the lake, when Marge came out carrying a big dinner bell. “Mind your ears,” she said, and then she clanged it several times.

&nb
sp; “That ought to get them moving,” she said. “Tiny’s idea, the bell. He thinks it reminds the sports of summer camp, or something.” She sat beside me. “I reckon you heard more than you wanted to last night. Sorry about that.”

  I shrugged. “I had hoped you wouldn’t know I was there.”

  “Well, I hope you don’t feel bad. And don’t take it too seriously.”

  “I’ve got a couple boys. I understand.”

  Marge rolled her eyes. “You never had daughters. You’re lucky.”

  “Lucky. I agree.”

  “Brady…”

  I turned to look at her. She was staring out at the lake. I said, “You don’t have to explain.”

  “What I mean is, what Polly said. That was just, you know, talk. Her anger.”

  I nodded. “Sure.”

  “Tiny’s a good man.”

  “The best,” I said.

  She rubbed her hands on the tops of her thighs. “Looks like a good day for fishing. Soft, just a little breeze. Radio said it’d be cloudy, but the mist’s gonna dry up. You going out with Woody?”

  “Woody and Frank Schatz, I guess.”

  “Mr. Schatz left with Gib. That was the two of them just took off. You’ll have Woody all to yourself.”

  I remembered seeing Gib and Schatz at the dock the previous evening. Mystery solved. “I didn’t know Schatz was leaving today.”

  Marge shrugged. “Me, neither. Guess he wasn’t having much fun. I suppose he arranged it with Tiny. Sports’ll do that, now and then. Find this isn’t what they bargained for. Anyway, we’re bracing ourselves for Mr. Rolando. The other Mr. Rolando, that is. The brother. Gib’ll be flying him in this afternoon. I think Tiny will want you around for that. Let me get you some more coffee. It’ll be just another few minutes before breakfast.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and gave her my mug.

  She brought me a refill and went back inside. I sat there, sipping and smoking and nodding to the people who straggled up from their cabins to the lodge. Lew Pike and two other guides came along first. Then the two elderly couples, followed by the pedantic Mr. Fisher and his bride. Woody straggled up alone.

  “You ready for some serious fishin’, Mr. Coyne?” he said.

  “You bet.” I nodded, rising to follow him inside.