Beautiful to the Bone (The Enuis Trilogy #1)

by P. G. Lengsfelder

  “Thank you,” I said keeping my eyes mostly on the road, the flat farmland of the lower Red River Valley spreading in every direction along the unseen shoreline of ancient Lake Agassiz. The fields were dry enough by then for the farmers to plow and plant without squandering their tractors to the mud. Mounds of sugar beet, corn, and barley rose from the primal silt.

  “For what?” He was curled up in the corner of the seat against the door, hoodie pulled down like a wanted felon avoiding the law.

  “For sticking your neck out in New York for me. And for that Carver job, the taxidermist.”

  “What did Carver have to do with me?”

  “You suggested there might be a job for me.”

  “Yeah, because the guy was creepy, the place was creepy, and the stuffin’s were creepy.”

  “He didn’t think of himself as a stuffer. It was art to him.”

  “But why me?” Lyle asked. “I only worked there a week.”

  “Thanks to you, I got to go to state.”

  “No shit. And now you and I are headed back to Momma and that fuckin’ hole of a farmhouse. No job, no prospects. One big fuckin’ round trip to nowhere.” He tugged his hood back a half-inch. “And you’re welcome.”

  I laughed and, reluctantly, so did he.

  “Seriously,” he straightened up, his eyes widening in recognition. “I never thought of the chemicals, but dya think those fumes every day . . . they might have poisoned your body, your brain?” His eyes were already past my answer, like he considered his own exposure.

  “It’s never bothered me,” I said. “I’m pretty healthy. Maybe someday.” Hydrochloric, Oxalic, Formic, the others. My blank spots?

  He said nothing and gazed dully through the windshield at the newly planted fields.

  Row after row of crops, like whitecaps upon the lake, extended to the horizon, hypnotizing me. “Anyhow,” I said, my eyes returning to the road, “why are you coming back? I don’t get it.”

  “Yeah, well . . . I guess I should help you a little, specially since that last gig-shit slipped through my fingers.”

  “Gig-shit. Sounds unappetizing.”

  “I’m here to help.”

  “Well, thank you again.”

  “You’re welcome again.”

  A three-inch giant water bug slammed the windshield, liquefied and glued to it. Lyle asked again, “You know anythin’ about those chemicals?”

  I shrugged him off. “You were only there a week.”

  “Yeah.” He studied the puréed insect. “I guess.”

  ***

  “Why don’t you play something,” I said to Lyle as we passed through the village of White Earth and its wreckage of scattered trailer homes reeking of poverty; shutters hanging by a wire, a child’s plastic wading pool —spores of black mold overtaking its pink and yellow— windows boarded with plywood and crisscrossed in duct tape, a rusted truck on blocks —like momma’s caboose— and small droppings of a man’s underwear embedded across a muddy side yard.

  “Not in the mood.” He batted away the invitation, the same wilted energy I’d felt from Harold just before he . . .

  “You can’t stop singing, whatever’s bugging you,” I said.

  He objected with a grumble.

  “You never met Harold, did you?”

  “No. He a nice guy? I guess he musta been if you married him.”

  “Yeah, he was.”

  From the corner of my eye I saw Lyle study my face, then turn back to the windshield and the advent of gradually rolling hills and simple farmhouses. “How come you always made do?”

  “Couldn’t depend on my good looks, could I?”

  “Guess not.” Then he realized how harsh it sounded. “Sorry. But Harold, he thought you were cool.”

  “He didn’t think anything was cool, but he had a good heart.”

  “You two were okay? I mean, you guys didn’t fight or anything?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Well . . . there was . . .”

  “What?”

  “Talk.” He lowered his eyes as we passed a small white church.

  “Like?”

  “You know, the cops and everything. You’ve always had that temper.”

  “Temper?”

  “They asked me a lot of questions about you, but I just said . . .”

  “What?” I tightened my gripped on the steering wheel.

  “That we aren’t a very close family and that all I knew is what I’d heard about him.”

  “Which was?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Yes, you do. Tell me.”

  “Aw, you know my friends, they’re kinda lowlifes. What do they know?”

  I slowed the car and put the blinker on, as if I’d pull into the dirt parking lot next to the church and the large cemetery.

  “Shall we hang out with the Lutherans till you tell me?” I knew his aversion to graveyards.

  “Well,” he waved me back onto the road, “he had a weird girlfriend or friend before you, I guess.”

  “What do you mean weird? What was her name?” This was the first I’d heard of any girlfriend of Harold’s. My jaw tightened. How easy it was to get lost in the marshy wetlands to our right and left.

  “Never got a name. Like I said, heard it from a friend.”

  “She was weird how?”

  “Dunno, she was strange, is all’s I remember.”

  “You’re strange, I’m strange. We’re all strange.”

  “Can’t remember.”

  “Can’t remember or won’t tell?”

  “I’d tell you. Like I said, it was one of my lowlife friends who mentioned it, ya know, drink talk. Pretty sure before you.”

  “Pretty sure! When we get to Bemidji find him for me, your lowlife friend.”

  “Her. The electrician. You want to meet her, really? Why?”

  “Set it up, okay? Just set it up.” Another clue, but it frightened me.

  I drove through more wetlands, past houses begun but never finished, through dense woodlands and past side roads, rutted, sandy and likely impossible to traverse. Certain traps. We skirted west of Bemidji, through the anachronistic town of Pony Lake with its reassuring quaintness and steeple church, then north past more trailer homes —some derelict, others qualified to be. Finally, we turned onto the Smith Road dirt, past sparsely-flung neighbor shanties, neighbors we mostly avoided and who mostly avoided us, till we reached Momma’s dilapidated farmhouse, the old caboose with its cupola still up on timbers, still shredding life particle-by-particle, still laboring against the inevitable.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  “You ready?” I asked.

  Lyle and I shared a last look of uneasy solidarity, the farmhouse quavering to a silent wind, like it could topple and consume us at any moment.

  Seeing his despondence I patted his leg. “It’ll be fine.”

  “Wonder if the spooks will remember us,” he said. “Cause Momma don’t want no misery.”

  Even as he made fun of the resident spirits, his apprehension was apparent. I could see and sense them too, in the peeling gunmetal paint, the rotting planks, the intransigent weeds. “Come on.” I pulled my luggage from the trunk.

  We approached through the rear entryway, the kitchen door the only functioning portal in or out, as far as I could remember, unless one shimmied down the drainpipe, and even then . . . Some might never get out; a flicker of approval for Carly.

  Cigarette haze hung in the air, two empty Keystone bottles chaperoned an ashtray brimming with spent Lucky Strikes. Absurdly balanced, like a discontinued museum diorama, the mounted creatures and wax figures already stored away, or destroyed. The room hadn’t changed, the sickly pale green cabinets and brown scuffed floral linoleum familiarly dangerous and vaguely welcoming. I had just walked out of that room, hadn’t I?

  Momma straggled into the room carrying a third bottle. “I see you made it. Go put your stuff away.” She zigzagged over to Lyle and left a wet kiss on his cheek, which
he quickly but surreptitiously wiped away when she finally acknowledged me. “Easy trip?”

  “Forty hours, Momma,” Lyle answered wearily before I could speak.

  “Well maybe Eunis can rustle up some dinner for us. I’ll bet you’re hungry.”

  I seethed. I determined that my first project would be to purify the outside, scraping and repainting the house, anything to stay outside.

  ***

  When I settled onto my old bed for the first time, pressure clamped my whole head. I started to address the room, then stopped. “No,” I said.

  I pulled the journal out of my luggage, and finding a comfortable angle between pillow and wall, I wrote:

  “Harold,

  “I’m back in the cellar —my old room. Only mustier. More cobwebs. Like Momma always knew I’d return. William Schroeder waiting for me on the wall. What did he have, really? Eighteen days before the strokes and becoming vegetative? What we can do now!

  “Anyway, my room: it’s even smaller than I remember, though I haven’t been gone that long. Maybe I’ve gotten bigger. Ha! Maybe.

  “Otherwise, no changes. Not even Momma. There’s nothing wrong with her that wasn’t wrong with her when I left six months ago that I can see.

  “But there was one surprise: I opened a kitchen cupboard and noticed my stepfather’s favorite plate at the bottom of a stack. Sounds silly, a favorite plate. But he’d worked for the railroad his entire life before the accident, and that handmade plate, a large uneven brown plate with the railroad’s insignia emblazoned in dark brown and orange in the center, was all he’d eat off of.

  “At least once a week, he’d tell me about the plate and the railroad, like he’d never told me before. The rest of them didn’t listen. Sometimes Carly would carry on another conversation with Momma, as if Papa Karlyle wasn’t even talking. He paid it no mind because he loved telling me about the railroad.

  “Anyhow, the plate reminded me of him, and how kind he was to everyone. Even me. He’s probably the only family I ever had before you.

  “By the way, was my temper that bad? I don’t remember being violent. I need clues. You didn’t leave many.”

  ***

  After renting a pressure washer, ordering paint, and grabbing some basic tools in town, I deduced that a phone call to Muriel and Rhoald, Harold’s parents, was a poor investigative approach since they would almost certainly tell me to go to hell, or at least Rhoald would. Muriel would be more demure, not that either of them would know what that word meant.

  So I gave them no warning and knocked on their door. I glanced nervously around the compulsively clean and organized yard. Already beyond the ravages of winter and early spring, the yard bloomed ground plum and an edge of marsh marigold. In the first week of April!

  I turned to the door. Was there a radio playing? I knocked again. Please, make it Muriel. The solid black door opened.

  “God,” he said, “it’s you.” Rhoald slammed the door in my face.

  I closed my eyes, took a breath, knocked again.

  The door sprung instantly open. Rhoald’s eyes were fevered, his small beet-red face and pate of remaining hair bristled. “Zombie, don’t you get the message? You’re not welcome. Not ever.”

  “I need to talk to you about Harold.”

  “Mean the son you killed? Our only son.”

  “I didn’t kill him.” But there was so much I couldn’t explain. Guilt and the nagging feeling of anger I had for Harold.

  “The cops weren’t so sure of that, but I guess your good looks got you off.” He sneered. “Anyway, we have nothin’ to discuss.”

  You’re a scientist, a detective. “Don’t you want to know why he killed himself?”

  “My son wouldn’t kill himself.”

  “Well, who would?”

  “If it wasn’t by you directly, it was by you indirectly. And he’s dead. There’s nothin’ to talk about.”

  “Rhoald, who’s at the door?” Muriel’s voice came from inside the house.

  “And don’t upset her. You’ve already done enough.” He slammed the door a second time.

  ***

  Sarah Pooley’s oxidized sedan sat in the farmhouse driveway, burgundy going on gray, and Sarah herself met me as I entered the kitchen. “Your mother’s lookin’ for you.”

  “Hello to you too, Sarah.”

  She curled and tightened her lips —especially her upper lip— so that rigid lines carved away from her ashen mouth. Aging like uncovered guacamole. “Welcome,” she said stiffly. “Your mother needs you.”

  “She seems fine to me. Most of my work’s going to be outside.”

  “She’s gettin’ older. You can’t see all the trouble.”

  “Momma’s what, fifty-seven now? That’s not old.”

  “I’m not gonna argue with you.” Sarah pulled on her light jacket. “It’s your responsibility and you’ve got enough strikes against you that I’d think you’d just take care of the one person who took care of you when nobody else gave a shit. Good bye.” She pushed past me and out of the farmhouse.

  “Hey.” Lyle headed sheepishly for the old Frigidaire as if he’d heard nothing.

  “She doesn’t look sick to me,” I said. “Why’d you get me up here?”

  “Told you,” Lyle talked into the fridge, grabbing white bread and mayo and some luncheon meat. “Momma said she needed you.”

  “And the doctor?”

  He shrugged.

  “That’s the same answer you gave me the last time, except now here I am.”

  He started building his sandwich, licking the knife of mayo as he went along, then putting it back in the jar.

  “That’s disgusting.”

  “No big deal.” He launched into the sandwich as cover.

  “When you’re done stuffing your face you’re going to drive down to town, and you’re going to find your friend and that weird woman, the one who was friends with Harold. And you’re going to set up a meeting or get her name and an address.”

  “My friend? She’s probably long gone.”

  “I’ll be long gone if you don’t help me. You can deal with Momma.” But I knew better, even as I said it.

  He turned pale. “You’d desert her?”

  “I took your word that she needed me.”

  “She does.”

  “Yeah, as a housekeeper, delivery service and general punching bag. Until I see or hear proof that she’s actually sick, I’m setting my own rules. I’ve got my own agenda. You understand?”

  “Don’t be that way.”

  “Find me a clue.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  “What’re ya doin’?” asked Momma, “Them’s mine.”

  “Momma,” I took hold of a half-finished pint of gin, “you’re so sick this alcohol can’t be good for you.”

  “Put those bottles down,” she said with a vengeance.

  “Let me check with your doctor. What’s his name?”

  “None of your damn business.”

  “I’m here to help. You said you needed me up here, right? Or was that something Lyle made up?”

  “Lyle’s a good boy.”

  “He’s a man, and the good part can be argued. Did you tell him I had to come up?”

  “Sorta. Now put down those damn bottles. At my age I gotta right to enjoy myself.”

  “Seems like that age started around the time I was four.”

  “You ain’t got no idea what it’s like bringing up a baby alone.”

  “You had Karl.”

  “Only after I made myself available to him . . . for yer sake.”

  “Papa Karl was a good man.”

  “Karlyle was a simpleton. A dreamer and a simpleton.”

  “What’s your doctor’s name?”

  “Not till you put down my bottles.” Momma stuck out her chin.

  “I got places on this farm you’ll never find them. Especially with all my tools and tarps spread across the yard and by the barn. I can wait.” I kept gathering additi
onal bottles of schnapps and Yukon Jack from the cupboard.

  “Ungrateful little shit!”

  “Doctor’s name.”

  “Hall.”

  “First name?”

  “Doctor.”

  “There must be twenty doctor Halls in the area. And not one of them will give me any information unless I call him with some assurance.”

  “Don’t know his first name. Give me my fuckin’ bottles.” Momma charged me.

  I stood my ground. “Maybe I’ll just drop them here, let you clean them up.”

  She stopped, shook with anger, looked for something to throw at me. “After all I’ve done.”

  It was a familiar anger; I recognized it . . . in myself. “You’ve taught me well.”

  She reached for the skillet on the stove. “Gimme my bottles!”

  I could look like her. I could rage. I was ashamed. “Or you’ll what? You’ll throw me out?” And then I even understood the frustration on her face.

  My cell phone rang. Damn it! Hands useless. I had to put the bottles down. “You’re off the hook for now,” I said changing my tone to sweetness, “but I want to make sure you’re as healthy as you can be.”

  I laid the armful of bottles onto the counter and Momma started grabbing them back.

  “Yes?” I said to the cell, and listened. “That’s good enough, Lyle. Thanks.”

  ***

  The Drink ‘n’ Dive, not surprisingly, sat in the only part of Bemidji that hadn’t been restored, an anachronism, or worse: an indelible stain. Going back at least fifty years it had been the purlieu for drunks, drugs, hookers, trouble. The stories Momma told. Even the cops avoided it.

  I headed there to question Lyle’s connection, Sparky. On the way, I imagined her. She might be the woman whose hair was stashed in Harold’s Edgar Allan Poe book. Its unsavory qualities still with me.

  When I arrived, Sparky’s gray junker van, “Lightning Electric,” was parked outside.

  As I stepped into the bar’s gloom I almost crashed into Geraldine Mae Scotts, the notorious eighty-something-year-old grand diva who’d been singing bawdy sea shanties at the bar for more than half a century.