BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2)

by Edward A. Stabler

  This conflicts with Drew's assertion that Henry would bring a revolver. Is Zimmerman telling the truth?

  "So what happened?"

  "I was waiting on the towpath by the trailhead when Drew come up. He asked if I was ready to go see Gig and I said I was. Never mentioned waiting for you, or that you was supposed to be there." Zimmerman pauses to lick his index finger, sweep it across the specks of heroin left on the table, then brush it against his teeth and inhale sharply.

  "We followed the trail through the woods to Gig's cabin. It's low ground and muddy, and the trail branches a few times. We turned wrong at the last fork, and we come to the creek near the back of the cabin, which is built up on a mound. Gig had a dog tied up there and it started barking at us. So by the time we backtracked to the other fork and got to the front door, he might of known someone was there."

  "Did he come out to meet you?"

  "No, we knocked. I was up front, with your brother to the side. Gig opened the door without asking who it was. He didn't have his boots on, just wool slippers. Looked like maybe he was reading after dinner. He had a table made of planks near the back wall and there was a newspaper and some dishes on it.

  "'Kinda late for a social call, ain't it Henry?' he says. Then he looks at Drew and says 'last time someone showed up at my door unexpected, my dog bit him in the leg.'"

  "'Well we already seen your dog,' I say, 'so we knew he wasn't waiting for us at the door.' Gig recognized your brother, but I introduced them again anyway and they shook hands, though neither one looked happy about it. I told Gig we come because if he was going to live in Cabin John he would run into Drew and me and other people that was friends with Jessie. So we wanted to clear the air about something that been hanging over us for the last eight years."

  "He didn't slam the door in your face?"

  "No, he invited us in. He pulled out three chairs from his table and we sat in a triangle in the middle of the floor. They was rough chairs, made from heavy branches with some of the bark still on 'em, and lashed with twine. Not too comfortable, which was probably how Gig wanted us. I had done all of the talking up to that point, so your brother took over.

  "Drew said that the police said Jessie died by accident. She fell from the aqueduct bridge at Widewater – that's how it read in the police report. But the inspectors still wanted to talk to Gig about the last times he seen Jessie. They wanted to know was she distressed or melancholy.

  "And they was going to get fingerprints from some people that knowed her, so they could see if there was a match with prints on the locket. Drew said that some of us already had our fingerprints made, and now that Gig was back from the Yukon, he should do the same. Drew said he was sure they wasn't going to find a match on the locket, and that would stop the rumors about Jessie's death."

  "How did Gig react?"

  "He didn't say nothing right away. Just sat there for a minute rubbing the stubble on his chin."

  I try to picture three chairs forming a triangle on the floor of Garrett's one-room cabin, Henry and Drew staring warily at Garrett and wondering how he'll respond. Maybe Drew has already pulled the pistol from his pocket and settled it against his thigh.

  Zimmerman continues without any prompt from me. "'Well I ain't responsible for what happened to Jessie,' Gig said, 'so I got no reason to go with you. If the sheriff wants my fingerprints so bad, you tell him to visit me hisself.'

  "And then Drew stood up and pulled out his gun and pointed it to the floor. 'The sheriff is expecting to see you tonight,' he said, 'so let's not disappoint him.' Drew turned to me and said 'Henry, my brother Owen has a pair of handcuffs, and he should be waiting where the trailhead meets the towpath. Can you go get him while I stay here with Gig?'

  "I told your brother that I didn't think it was a good idea to leave the two of ‘em together, even though he was armed and Gig wasn't. So Drew looked around the cabin and saw the trapdoor between us and the fireplace. He asked me what was down there and I told him it was just a wood-cellar... maybe held a cord of wood. No other way in or out, and not even deep enough to stand up straight. Drew pointed his gun at Gig's waist and told him to stay seated. Then he asked me to open the trapdoor.

  "Drew looked down into the cellar and then back at Gig. 'He can stand down there while you go get Owen,' he said. 'That will keep him from trying to run off.' There was no ladder, you just dropped down five or six feet to the dirt floor and used a notch in the post to climb out. So Drew stepped away and waved his gun at Gig, telling him to hop down. Gig didn't argue, just walked over, sat down on the floor, swung his legs into the cellar, and lowered hisself down. Didn't even ask to put on some real shoes.

  "The top of Gig's head come up through the opening, maybe an inch above the level of the floor. Drew stood a few feet away with his revolver aimed at Gig and told him to stay right there. Then he turned to me and told me again where to find you, that you was coming up from Lock 7, and to go quick."

  I pull the Colt onto my lap and swivel on my stool to lean against the aft wall of the cabin, mirroring Zimmerman's pose on the other side of the drop-leaf table. His eyes dart toward me as I move, then relax and drift back toward the opposite wall.

  "And that was why you left him there? You thought he'd be safe because Garrett was standing in the cellar?" So far Zimmerman's story sounds a lot like the one I heard twenty-two years ago from Inspector Bullard.

  "I couldn't see what else to do," Zimmerman says. "It seemed like Drew changed our plan, like he decided he wasn't going to leave without Gig. Maybe he didn't believe the sheriff would actually come get Gig's fingerprints.

  "So I left and ran back along the trail to the towpath. There's muddy spots and forks joining from both sides, but going that direction you can't turn wrong. I climbed up that little rise to the towpath and no one was waiting there. I was feeling strung tight – things wasn't going the way I expected. I thought about going back to the cabin, but didn't reckon Drew would change his mind. I remember thinking maybe he didn't want me there... maybe he wanted to talk to Gig in private, and my job was done when Gig opened the door. Or maybe Drew had something else in mind. But I was getting jittery waiting on the towpath and couldn't stand still. And your brother said you was coming from Lock 7, so I took off running downstream."

  "Then you must have been invisible," I say, "because I ran up from Lock 7 to the trailhead and didn't see a soul."

  But as soon as I say that, I remember that I'd only waited for Drew and Henry at the deserted trailhead for a matter of seconds. Then I'd continued a few minutes further to the closed Lovers Lane footbridge before I realized that they weren't there and turned back. During that spurious detour, Henry could have popped up out of the woods and run downstream on the towpath.

  Zimmerman leans forward and snares his cup, tilts back a swig, and smirks at me as he plants both hands on the table. "Maybe you're the one who was invisible. Maybe you was too scared to even make it across the canal, and that's why things went wrong."

  Heat flares in my throat but I don't take the bait. I unbutton the collar of my shirt with one hand and lift the Colt from my lap with the other.

  "Well I'm not scared now." I flick the safety catch off, on, off again, then let the barrel swing toward Zimmerman. "And I know my own weaknesses well enough. I don't think Drew would have died that night if I'd followed him through the culvert. What I don't know are your weaknesses, or whether you're telling the truth."

  Zimmerman slowly draws back from the table, and it occurs to me that he might also be armed. His lips curl into a smile framed by creases and his hands drop onto his lap as he eases back into position against the wall. I lower the Colt back to the table with the safety catch off, then prop an elbow alongside it so that it's still within pivoting reach of my hand.

  "Did you go all the way to Lock 7?"

  "I did," he says. "But I was expecting to find you before I got there. When you wasn't at Lock 7, I figured something had gone wrong. Maybe Drew sent me in the wrong direc
tion. More likely, I thought, you wasn't coming. Either you got scared and stayed home or something else happened to you. I also wondered if Drew was lying to me... maybe he was planning to shoot Gig and make it look like self-defense, though that seemed like a stretch with him in Garrett's cabin.

  "I was thinking about what to do next, pacing around on the towpath near the lock. Then a man come running down the driveway to the locktender's house, which is only twenty paces away. He banged on the door and someone answered and there was some excited talk I couldn't make out. But I heared the word 'fire'. Then the two men and a boy run to the lock and cross over. The men was carrying a shovel and a bucket and I stepped back toward the trees as they headed up the towpath.

  "Why didn't you run back to the trailhead with them?"

  "At that point my head was filling up with black visions. Something awful must be happening at Gig's cabin, but I couldn't think it through. When I turned my feet in that direction I couldn't take a step. I heared voices, then saw more people running down the hill toward the lockhouse. It seemed like going back there would ruin my life."

  "I crossed the lock, climbed the hill up toward Conduit Road, and kept going. Out to River Road and headed west. Slept that night in an old stable near Tobytown, then back down to the towpath and out to Point of Rocks the next day. I caught a ride on the B&O, and from there it was just one railyard after another all the way to California."

  Chapter 10

  I stare into my cup and the last finger of whiskey stings my eyes, so I knock it back and inhale the warmth of the cabin. The room seems to swim a little. Zimmerman is leaning against the aft wall with his eyes closed, lost in reverie or asleep. Maybe it's the heroin. I slap my empty cup down on the table and he opens his eyes.

  "Your story sounds just like Inspector Bullard's explanation back then. Maybe that's the way it happened, or maybe Drew was wrong about you. Maybe you and Garrett figured out how to get Drew off his back. You played along with the fingerprinting idea, but your real plan was to make Drew an armed intruder. Then Garrett could shoot him in self-defense."

  "Well if that was the plan, I guess it didn't work out so well for Gig."

  No it didn't, and that's the main reason this interpretation seems wrong. When he reappeared in Cabin John in 1902, Garrett had spent the previous eight years in mining camps in Colorado, Juneau, the Yukon, and Nome. He'd become comfortable – some said rich – operating in frontier conditions alongside strong-willed characters with guns. By comparison, Drew was a choir boy. So it's hard to believe that if he knew in advance Henry was bringing Drew to his cabin, Garrett would have ended up shot and immolated in his own wood cellar.

  So maybe Bullard got it right, and Zimmerman is telling the truth.

  "Okay, Henry. You ran down to Lock 7 and then panicked when you realized something must have gone wrong at the cabin. You saw people running up the towpath and you went the opposite direction. The next day you hopped a train, and you kept going all the way to California. Why? You wouldn't have been blamed for Drew and Garrett shooting each other. What were you running from?"

  I look over at Zimmerman and his brow furrows as his eyes sink deeper into the wrinkled flesh surrounding them.

  "Calamity," he says softly after a moment. "It was going to swallow me up if I stayed. Like them clouds of mosquitoes in the Yukon that turn the sky black in summer. If you don't outrun 'em you bleed to death."

  "Calamity? Without going back to the cabin, you couldn't have known for sure what had happened there. Gig Garrett might as well have been your brother – you just said the two of you were still friends that night, and that was why he opened the door. But you fled west and never looked back. What if Garrett had only been hurt and needed your help? What if the police had needed you to confirm his story, or Drew's?"

  Zimmerman shakes his head and his eyes turn a darker shade of blue as they narrow. "When I realized your brother wasn't going to back down, I knew it was over for Gig," he says. "There was nothing I could do for him. I seen it coming a long time."

  "Seen what coming?"

  "The end of the road. He was heading to a place where what was happening around him didn't matter no more. Friends, family... chances to buy or sell, things to build or fix. All that mattered was what was going on inside his head. I saw it clear when I met up with him in Nome, in August of 1900. A year after we split up in Rampart. But after that I could look back and see signs from earlier. Dawson during the summer of '98. Circle City in '96, and what I heared about his days there. And before that Jessie, down at Widewater in '94."

  "Do you still think he killed her?"

  Zimmerman stares at me without answering, then blinks, and his eyes wash back to pale blue as if the tide behind them has gone out. He nods, almost imperceptibly.

  "There's a part of him that done it," he says softly. "But not for the reason anyone thinks."

  "You mean not because he couldn't stand losing Jessie to Drew?"

  Zimmerman nods again and twists away from me, planting his back against the wall.

  "I growed up with Gig Garrett. I was nineteen and he was twenty when Jessie died, but I don't think I really knowed him then. Me or anyone else. I started to see another side of Gig after I joined up with him in Dawson."

  ***

  In the summer of 1897, when I was thirteen, my father showed me a headline in the Washington Post that declared "Alaska an Eldorado!" I hadn't read Candide or Edgar Allan Poe's poem, so he had to explain that El Dorado was a mythical lost city of gold. That captured my imagination. Especially when it was juxtaposed with Alaska, with its mountains and glaciers and midnight sun. To me Alaska already sounded like one of the most exotic places on earth, and now it was also the land of endless gold fields?

  For the rest of the year, there were articles in the newspaper every month about the stateside frenzy triggered by the discovery of unfathomable riches on the Klondike River. The word Klondike was quickly mastered by restless men from Montana to Manhattan to Maine. Like many others, I learned that the Klondike is a lesser tributary of the mighty Yukon, and that the Yukon River is as important to Alaska as the Mississippi River is to the midwest. But while it spends most of its two thousand miles curving northwest and southwest through the heart of Alaska, the Yukon gathers itself in Canada, and the Klondike gold fields were entirely on Canadian soil.

  I was too young to join the stampeders in their twenties and thirties who set out for the Klondike, turning their backs on occupations that would never make them rich. But that didn't keep me from imagining the pilgrimage. And when I left home five years later, first for college in Austin and from there toward a very different treasure in New Mexico, I realized that my departure was at least partly inspired by stories I had read about the Klondike gold rush.

  And now Zimmerman has mentioned Dawson, the town that sprouted where the Klondike entered the Yukon, and offered his gold-rush days with Garrett as a prism that might distill a coherent view of the dead man's motives. Or maybe, it occurs to me, Zimmerman will inadvertently confess his own. I pluck the Colt from the table, point the barrel toward the ceiling and flip the safety catch back on, then lower the pistol to my lap.

  "I don't have a curfew tonight," I say. "Tell me what happened up there."

  ***

  "June '97," Zimmerman says, turning toward me after a long pause. "Two ships come into San Francisco and Seattle, and a posse of ragged miners walk off with three tons of Klondike gold. It was like red meat to hungry dogs, and the rush was on." He gets up, snares both of our cups with a gesture that seems incongruously quick, and pours whiskey into them from the cask on the counter.

  "Maybe a hundred thousand men stampeding from the states and Canada. Just as many more from everywhere else – England, Norway, Russia, Australia, Greece." He hands me a cup and settles onto his stool, back against the wall. "Almost all was tenderfoots that never worked a prospect, probably never held a pan. But it didn't matter – they dropped what they was doing to head for the gold f
ields." His mouth cracks into a crooked grin and his voice turns momentarily wheezy. "As if that's what it was – gold fields.

  "Some people was going to pull wagons. Others had bicycles. When they got to the Klondike they was going to shovel up nuggets off the ground until they was rich, then drive their buggies home while they counted their money.

  "But it don't matter where you start from, the Klondike is months away, past country that killed or crippled scores of men. Thousands of horses was dragged up those trails and I don't think a single one survived. The snow on Chilkoot Pass is too steep even for dogs. If you wanted a sled team, you had to carry them over one by one on your back.

  "Some greenhorns thought they could skip the passes and dogsled straight across the glaciers. But if you didn't have goggles you went snow-blind, and the pain drove you mad. Even with goggles you couldn't make out thin layers of snow that was covering cracks three hundred feet deep. If the sled broke through, it would drag the dogs in with it, howling and scrambling. You couldn't cut their traces in time. They'd fall into a river of glacier water that was too far down in the blackness to see. If you was on the sled, you go with 'em.

  "Others believed what them outfitters and their pamphlets said: you could stroll into the Yukon basin from the southeast on stock trails that was well marked... reach the Klondike in ninety days. Some was crazy enough to start from Edmonton, which is twelve hundred miles away if you're a crow – twice as far if you have legs. Most of them was bled dry by mosquitoes or lost everything bushwhacking deadfall and swamp. Some starved in miserable cabins they built when winter came. Others watched their teeth fall out and their skin turn to clay while they died slow from scurvy."

  He glances my way and presses his lips into a cynical smile.

  "And the pamphlets was wrong on something else – there's nothing to graze in that country unless you're a reindeer that eats moss. So thousands of horses on the pack trails starved to death or got shot.