Dead Meat

by William G. Tapply

  Lew spat dismissively over the rail. I gestured to the rocker beside me. “Sure. Have a seat.”

  “Been sittin’ all day,” said Gib. “Want to take a stroll?”

  I shrugged and got up. “Why not?”

  I nodded to Pike, and Gib and I wandered down to the lake. A light breeze had sprung up, finally cutting the heat of the day and fluffing up the surface of the water.

  Gib stared out at the lake. “Been thinkin’,” he said. “Might be needin’ help. Lawyer-type help.”

  He turned to look at me. I nodded. “What’s the problem?”

  He squinted, then shook his head. “Don’t want to talk about it just now. Thing is this. Would you mind flyin’ down to Greenville with me tomorrow?”

  I frowned. “I suppose I could do that.”

  “Oh, I’ll pay you, man. I’d expect to do that.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’d like a hint, though.”

  “Rather not.” He tried to grin, but there was too much tension in his face, and it came out a grimace. “Better to wait. Sorry to make a mystery out of it. You’ll understand.”

  I shrugged. “I’m glad to help you. But tell me one thing, at least. Does this have anything to do with the murder? Do you know something?”

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he walked out onto the dock. I followed him. He lifted his drink and emptied it into his mouth. He swallowed, murmuring, “Ahh,” then tipped the ice cubes out into the lake.

  “You’ve been comin’ here for a long time, haven’t you?” he said.

  “A long time.”

  “Pretty friendly with Tiny.”

  “Yes.”

  “And Marge, too, huh?”

  I cocked my head at him. I wondered if he suspected something. But his face seemed blank. I nodded.

  “But it’s Vern Wheeler who pays you.”

  “Right.”

  “Me, too.” He nodded his head a couple times. “First loyalty’s to Vern, ain’t it?”

  “I guess. It’s all the same.”

  Gib shook his head. “Nope. That’s wrong. First loyalty’s to yourself. Ain’t that so?”

  “What are you getting at?”

  He smiled quickly. “I’m in a little trouble, man, to tell you the truth. Guess maybe you figured that out. Got some business I need to straighten out. I’ll feel better, you bein’ with me. We can leave right after breakfast, if that’s okay with you.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “But I have to tell you. It’s not a good idea to have mysteries with your lawyer. Sure, I figured you were in trouble. If people didn’t have trouble, lawyers would be out of business. It would be best for you to tell me what’s going on. Trust me.”

  He said nothing. He frowned at me for a moment before evidently making a decision. Then he turned and started back toward the lodge. I caught up to him and grabbed his shoulder. He stopped and stood there, saying nothing, gazing with infinite patience up into the tops of the pine trees.

  “You’re making a mistake,” I said.

  He sighed and slowly turned to face me. “It ain’t you that I don’t trust, man. Leave it lay right there, okay?”

  I started to object. Then I changed my mind. I nodded, and together we trudged up the dark path.

  Before bed that night I went down to the dock to check on my loons. There was a figure hunched out on the end, silhouetted in the moonlight reflecting off the lake’s surface. It was Marge.

  I stopped in the shadows and watched her. She was hugging her knees, resting her cheek on top of them and staring out at the lake. She looked fragile and lonely, sitting out there on the rim of the wilderness, and I recognized in myself a powerful impulse to run out there and gather her up in my arms and carry her off as she had suggested, full steam ahead and damn the torpedoes.

  And, of course, damn my friendship with Tiny.

  And damn whatever good opinion of myself I still held.

  Marge seemed to feel that for me it should only be a practical problem, a matter of logistics and measurable consequences, a sort of utilitarian conundrum that could be solved by constructing the right equation and plugging in the right quantities for the constants and the variables. After all, she was the married one. It was, therefore, according to her calculus, she and she alone who confronted the moral issue. To cheat or not to cheat. Her question, not mine, which, she said, she had solved to her own satisfaction.

  She had it wrong, of course. I didn’t expect I could explain it to her. I didn’t believe she wanted to hear it. And it would do no good to tell her how close I came to damning the torpedoes and damning the last shreds of my own self-respect out there on that sandbar. Should I tell her how powerfully I wanted her? Should I try to explain the distinctions among what I want, what I care for, and what I love? Perhaps we could discuss the definition of infidelity. One American statesman believed that the dirty thought was the moral equivalent of the dirty deed, in which case both Marge and I were already guilty as charged, so why not salvage the fun out of it?

  I hesitated. It might be easiest to turn around, return to the lodge, and read John le Carré until I fell asleep.

  Equally easy: go tell her she misjudged me. My lust was powerful, my ethic weak. Then we could sneak off into the woods like a pair of adolescents and tear at each other’s clothing.

  I would, of course, do neither. I would attempt something civil. I slapped a smile onto my puss and strolled out to the dock.

  I sat down beside her. She looked up at me and smiled. She handed me a glass. “I anticipated you,” she said.

  “That’s real nice,” I said, accepting the drink. “Cigarette?”

  “That’s what I came for.”

  I held my pack of Winstons to her, and she plucked one out. Then I stuck one in my mouth. I held the lighter for her, cupping it in my hand. In the flicker of the flame I saw that she was staring at me.

  I lit my own cigarette, inhaled, and sipped the bourbon she had brought me. “Heard the loons yet?” I asked.

  She nodded. “They’re wailing tonight,” she said. “You ever notice the difference in their calls?”

  “Never paid much attention,” I said. “I just like to hear them.”

  “They have three distinct calls at least. There’s the wail, like tonight. Then there’s the yodel. And the tremolo. All different. They mean different things. At least to each other.”

  “You learn a lot, I guess, living in the woods like this.”

  She smiled and waved her hand in the air. “Naw. I read that somewhere. Tell the truth, I can’t tell a wail from a yodel from a tremolo. They all make me shiver.”

  At that instant, as if to confirm what she said, I heard from far uplake the eerie, laughing cry of a loon. It drifted down the lake toward us, sounding closer than it was over the water, and a moment later came an answer. Back and forth they went, and for several minutes Marge and I sat there in awed silence, listening.

  They stopped abruptly, as if they had been frightened. Marge chuckled, low in her throat. “Sometimes I feel as if I could understand what they’re trying to say. Their loneliness. They need to have a whole lake to themselves. You know, something else I read. The only real enemy of the loon is man. Did you know that?”

  “I might have guessed,” I said. “It’s true for a lot of creatures.”

  “Including man his own self,” said Marge. Still staring out at the lake, she said softly, “I’m real sorry about today, Brady. I put you in a tough spot. It wasn’t fair.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” I reached over and touched her hair.

  “I hope it doesn’t change anything.”

  I let my hand fall to her shoulder. I hugged her quickly, then let go. “It doesn’t.”

  She turned to look up at me. “I’ll take you fishing tomorrow if you like. Promise not to seduce you.”

  “I’d like to. I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Gib asked me to fly down to Greenville with him.”

&
nbsp; “What for?”

  “I don’t know. He wouldn’t tell me. Just said that he needed a lawyer.”

  “That’s pretty strange.”

  I shrugged. “Probably pretty straightforward. Something to do with his license, or his plane. Maybe an insurance problem. Maybe he got some girl in trouble.”

  Her head jerked around quickly. “It better not be my girl.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Forget it,” she said. “I wasn’t being serious.” She sipped her drink. “How long will you be staying here?”

  “I don’t know. Few more days, I’d guess. I’ll see how Tiny feels about it.”

  “I’m not anxious for you to leave.”

  “I’m not, either. Not that I’m doing anybody any good staying.”

  She shook her head. “You’re doing me good. Hey… Brady?”

  “Yes?”

  “Kiss me, huh?”

  “They can see us from the lodge, Marge.”

  She stood up and hugged herself. I stood beside her. “You’re right,” she said. “Of course. Someone might see us. They’re probably watching us. Even in this big wilderness, this big empty lake, people are watching…”

  She found my hand and squeezed it. “I’m just a silly old broad. Lonely as those damn loons. Please don’t think badly of me.”

  We walked slowly back to the lodge, careful not to touch each other.

  My sleep mechanism is set on a hair trigger, and all it took to awaken me the next morning was a faint rustling noise outside my door. The objects in my room were silhouettes. The window was a gray rectangle, emitting the half-light of dawn. I curled up fetally, facing away from the window, but it was no use. Once awake, I could not go back to sleep.

  I rolled onto my back and stared up at the ceiling. Then, with a great effort of will, I sat up on the edge of the bed. I hoped it wasn’t too early for coffee.

  I dressed quickly in the chill of the room. As I reached to open the door, I noticed a piece of paper on the floor. I bent and picked it up. There was pencil writing on it, but it was too dark in my room to read. I took it back to the bed and switched on the light.

  The brief message had been painstakingly printed. “Mr. Coyne,” it read. “I chickened out. I’m sorry.” It was signed: “Gib.”

  I read it again, but Gib’s note did not reveal anything new to me. Last night he had evidently intended an act of courage. This morning he had decided against it. The only constructive question I could formulate was: Why had he bothered to confess his cowardice to me?

  I folded Gib’s note and tucked it between the pages of the thick le Carré novel on the table beside my bed. Then I went downstairs. The big coffee urn had begun to awaken. It grunted and belched, but the red light signaling that it had completed its task had not yet blinked on. With a sigh I wandered out onto the porch, feeling decidedly incomplete without a mug of java in my hand.

  I sat in a rocker. I had, I mused, spent a great deal of time at Raven Lake this trip rocking and staring at the water and pondering unpleasant puzzles.

  Out in the middle of the lake, a ribbon of water was riffled by the breeze that blew down the length of it. The cove in front of me lay flat calm. Wisps of morning mist sifted up from its surface and dissipated instantly. Gib’s plane rocked gently by the dock. Half a dozen canoes lay overturned on the beach like the silvery husks of some giant variety of bean.

  As I watched, I saw Gib step down from inside the plane onto one of its pontoons. He disengaged two lines and tossed them up onto the dock. Then he climbed quickly back into the plane. Abruptly the silence of the predawn was shattered as the engine of the Cessna coughed once, then roared to life. A moment later it began to creep out toward the center of Raven Lake.

  Wherever he was headed, Gib had decided that he didn’t need me with him.

  As I sat there rocking and watching the plane slide across the water, a voice beside me said, “Coffee, Mr. Coyne?”

  I glanced up. Bud Turner was grinning down at me through a day’s stubble of black beard. He held out a mug of coffee to me.

  “Hey, thanks,” I said. “Join me?”

  He moved around and took the rocker beside me. “Just for a minute,” he said. “Can’t leave Marge and Polly alone too long in there. They start snipin’ at each other, they’ll burn the bacon.” He gazed out at the lake. “Gib’s off early.”

  “Mmm,” I murmured, sipping gingerly from the steaming hot mug.

  “He alone?” said Bud.

  “I don’t know. Just saw him get out to untie the plane. Couldn’t see if anybody was in there with him.”

  I lit a cigarette, the first, always the best one of the day, inhaled, sipped, and rocked, following the plane’s progress. It advanced perhaps five hundred yards, and then it turned to face uplake so it could take off into the headwind. Then Gib’s Cessna made a higher-pitched sound, as if it were running more quickly. Then I heard the whine of the engine change its pitch. The plane lurched forward. It plowed through the water, and I could see it gradually rise up on its twin pontoons so that it skimmed across the surface. It lifted momentarily, dropped, and then seemed to skip like a flat stone.

  It was the sound of the engine that caused me to sit forward. A cough, a hesitation, and then it all happened at the same time: the nose of the plane dipped, the tail lifted, the entire machine jerked and pivoted and seemed to rise up onto a wingtip. Etched into my brain was the image of Gib’s Cessna doing a cartwheel from wingtip to wingtip, but that was an illusion, a memory trick, because the explosion came at the same instant, so that it was impossible to remember whether the plane blew up before or after it began to bounce and the wing broke off and the nose buried itself in the water.

  A sudden, silent burst of orange light, like a midday sun, surrounded by a ring of black smoke, widened and then burst into a pillar of soot. The sound of the explosion came afterward, like an out-of-synch old movie, traveling slower than the picture across the water. When it arrived, it came in waves—first a single, low-pitched “crump” and then the boom-boom-boom, like a bass drum, pulsing ever more rapidly across the water until it all melted into a long, slow decrescendo.

  It ended abruptly. One moment the plane was skipping across the lake, nearly airborne. The next instant there was nothing there. Just the awful silence that follows an unexpected, ear-shattering noise.

  “Good Jesus,” whispered Bud.

  I sat there, rigid, staring out at the placid lake. A minute later Marge and Polly came rushing out onto the porch, and then Tiny joined us. We stared at the surface of the water, and all we could see was the absence of Gib’s airplane and the tranquil beauty of Raven Lake at dawn.

  “What in hell was that?” said Tiny.

  “Gib’s airplane. She blew up,” said Bud. “Just blew to hell up. Looked like she might’ve hit a snag.”

  “There’s a hundred feet of water out there in the middle,” said Tiny. “How in hell’s it gonna hit a snag?”

  Bud shrugged. “Must’ve hit something.”

  “It looked to me as if it blew up first,” I said. “It didn’t look like it hit anything to me.”

  “Anybody with him?” said Tiny.

  “I don’t know.”

  I turned around. Marge and Polly had gone back inside. Gib, I remembered, had been Polly’s guy. At least one of them.

  I continued to sit there while guests and guides came rushing up to the lodge, talking in excited voices.

  “Hey, I heard an explosion.”

  “Airplane blew up out on the lake.”

  “Gib got killed.”

  “Anybody else?”

  “Sounded like a goddamn bomb.”

  People ignored me. I ignored them. I sat there, smoking, sipping my coffee. I was an island of calm in a sea of chaos. But my mind was swirling with possibilities.

  Possibility one, and the most likely, was that I had witnessed a tragic accident. Gib had hit a floating log or had maneuvered near a shoal and collided with a subsur
face rock. Or his fuel system leaked and ignited inside the engine.

  Possibility two, which would never have occurred to me had I not received a note from him shortly before the explosion, was that Gib had killed himself. His note, his reference to “chickening out,” had been a suicide message, then. For a man like Gib it would be the perfect way to do it—racing across the top of the water in the plane he loved.

  What was missing from this was the motive, which I might have learned had he told me why he wanted me to go to Greenville with him.

  The third possibility I liked least of all, but given all the events that had occurred at Raven Lake in the week that I had been there, I was forced to concede its feasibility. Gib had been murdered. Somebody had cut his fuel line, perhaps. I knew too little about engines to speculate on the particular method. Perhaps the intention had been for him to take off, then achieve altitude far above the vast Maine forest before his engine failed so that he would spin to earth far from anyplace where he would be seen or his body found for a long time.

  Or maybe it had occurred exactly as planned, in plain sight and in the middle of the lake, where it would be witnessed and described as an accident and where all evidence would conveniently sink to the rocky bed of Raven Lake under a hundred feet of water.

  A motive for murder, like one for suicide, Gib had chosen not to share with me.

  While I sat there rocking, I saw two of the guides go down to the water, lift a canoe, flip it right side up, and slide it into the water. Then Lew Pike appeared, lugging an outboard motor. He climbed into the stern and crouched there, securing the motor to the transom. Then they shoved off.

  They chugged out toward the middle of the lake. I watched them as they circled around slowly out there. The sputter of their four-horse Evinrude reminded me, by contrast, of the earlier throaty roar of the Cessna.

  They stayed out there for nearly an hour. Then they came back. They tied up to the dock, climbed out, and trooped up to the lodge. They all nodded to me, and I said, “Find anything?”

  “Nothin’,” said Pike. “Not a goddamn thing.”

  After a while, Marge came out with a fresh mug of coffee for me. Her face was red and stained from crying. She accepted my empty mug in exchange for the full one she handed me. Then she stood there for a moment, staring dolefully down at me. Without speaking, she turned and went back inside.