by Warren Read
“I’ll just write up my statement and then head on out.” Jackie stepped away from the men and walked back to the rear of her pickup, using the dropped tailgate as a desk where she scratched away at a notepad. From where he stood, Louis could see a cloud of flies and the dark mound of something just behind a stand of lodgepoles.
He began to walk toward the site. “Who found it?”
“She did,” said Mitch. “Heading to the sunrise, windows down. Caught the smell. She had smelled deer before. She knew this was not deer.”
The body was fully clothed and intact so that Louis could easily see it was a male, white, though hard to tell the fellow’s age or how long he’d been there. The hair was a dirty brown, shocks of gray on the sides with a face full and round, though it was likely that some of it was because of swelling. Louis was not a forensic expert, but he’d learned plenty in his years, the complications of altitude and climate and humidity on the decomposition of flesh. Two bodies could be dropped at the same time, in the same county, and look entirely different in a month’s time.
“What did you find in the way of tracks?” Louis asked.
Mitch shook his head. “What’s there is hers, from what I can tell. Straight shot between her truck and the body.”
The men gloved up and Mitchell walked the perimeter of the site with his 35mm, the shutter snapping away as he peered down on the body from above and then beside it, squatting close to the ground, gently moving branches and brush to allow the light in.
With the exception of the chalky residue of evaporated sweat around his collar, and under his arms, almost everything about the corpse was tidy: the way the arms lay close to the sides, the shirt buttons secured. Even the trouser cuffs fell neatly over the boot laces. In all, the man could have easily been mistaken for someone who’d simply fallen asleep in the shadow of the Ponderosa and never gotten up.
It was another hour before Orly Downs arrived from Colville in his paneled wagon. Louis had been in Orly’s company a half dozen or so times over the years, always in the presence of a corpse—at the base of a staircase, over a tub of cloudy bathwater, at the side of the road at night, air thick with gasoline and whiskey. The first thing Orly always did was reach down and press the eyelids closed, and this time was no different.
Today, Orly was as old as he’d ever been, and he moved as if every minute of his life was a precious commodity not to be wasted. Talk was spare and intentional, and no physical act was without purpose. He lowered himself to his knees and rolled the body from the shoulder, gently, then laid it back down onto the dirt. He ran a bony finger along the collar and tugged it down below the knobby Adam’s apple. He reached down and drew up the forearm by the shirt cuff, then paused, as if the dead man was signaling a question.
“Look at this,” Orly said, pointing at the fellow’s fingers. There was a curious rawness to them, the knuckles chafed, as if they’d been scraped over pavement.
Louis squatted down and leaned in. “That is something,” he said, nodding to Mitch. The deputy bent down with his camera and snapped a shot. Louis reached across and took hold of the other wrist, lifting it to get a look at the hand.
“Same,” Mitch said. “Maybe a fight?”
“Could be,” Louis said. “With a brick wall.”
Beyond that, any evidence that had been present was sparse, the man’s pockets empty, nothing onsite that would indicate he died where he was found. Somewhere, Louis wondered, there might be a clearer story that existed over a cluster of sagebrush or stretch of concrete, or some cheap motel carpet or, perhaps even, the upholstery of somebody’s car. But for now, it was a man lying under a lone pine tree with no wounds other than a little scuff on his fingers.
“Pig in a poke?” Mitch said.
Louis shrugged. They would wait. Wait to see what Orly Downs had to say after he got the fellow back to Colville, to pore over the clothing and cut it from the body and wash it all down, look over every square inch of what was left. Sometimes, as Louis found, there could be surprises.
It was almost one when Louis turned onto his street, only to see Hattie Walton’s brown Fairmont with the mashed rear fender parked comfortably against the curb of his house. The front picture window drapes were drawn.
He pulled to a stop behind the wreck of a car and tapped his horn twice before getting out and shutting the door behind him. The boy on the pink bike rounded the corner and pedaled his way toward Louis, and as he got closer, Louis thought of the fireworks kid with the stubbed pointer. They were about the same age, he figured.
“Hey.” The kid had waved at Louis before but had never said anything to him.
“Hello to you. What’s your name?” The rich smell of cedar and iron-rich dirt hung in the air, and everything seemed so dry and parched, he could not recall when he had set out the sprinkler last. It was a miracle he had a single blade of grass still alive.
“Luis,” the boy said.
“You don’t say.” He looked down at the basket, at the collection of little toy cars and trucks piled inside. “Your sister lets you use her bike to carry your cars around?”
The boy squinted up at him. “I don’t got a sister,” he said. “This is my bike.”
Louis nodded. “Fair enough.” And then the boy said, “I gotta go now,” and Louis gave a little salute to him as he rode off, those crazy tassels swinging back and forth as he pedaled away.
And then he finally walked up the front pathway and took hold of the porch rail, making his way slowly up the steps, planting his feet heavy on the boards before opening the door and stepping inside.
13
Nadine and Lester had gone to town earlier, for steaks and beers at Tiny’s Roadhouse just off highway 16. It was a thing they did every couple of weeks or so. A way to get out of the woods and be among people, people Lester seemed to know in one way or another. Lester had drunk a pitcher on his own while Nadine nursed the same rum and Coke for most of the night. She liked to get a buzz on when she could but, Jesus, Lester was drinking like it was a sport and when that happened it was always a good idea for her to stay on the right side of sober.
It had all been going pretty well, but then Lester started poking at an old onion-nosed lumberjack twice his size, restarting some debate that, judging from the whoops and eye rolls around them, should have been dead, buried and forgotten a long time ago. Nadine couldn’t follow the logic in it all, something about a woman named Frieda and a puppy mill in Yakima. It was getting loud and neither side was winning, and the bartender was getting hot.
“I’m not entertaining this tonight,” he hollered over them. Then he took Lester’s glass from in front of him and turned to Nadine. “Take him home,” he said, “before he gets taken out.”
Nadine tugged on Lester’s belt loop. “Let him win this one,” she said. “Let’s hit the road.”
“I’m not done yet,” he said, not even turning to look at her.
“The hell you aren’t.” She slapped a five-dollar bill on the counter and gave his belt loop a good pull. When he finally turned around his eyes looked past her, glassy and lost. She cupped her palm beneath his whiskered chin and it was then that he seemed to find her, blinking, a goofy smile rolling over his face.
“Well,” he said. “Look at you.”
By the time they got home he was already half asleep, and he didn’t get any further than the sofa before he laid himself down and stayed put. Nadine threw a blanket over him and went on into the bedroom by herself, which was fine by her at this point. Sleep came pretty quickly, and she was nearly into a full dream when the painful bell of the nightstand phone pulled her out of it. One hard ring and then another, and as she leaned over Lester’s side of the bed to grab the hand piece, it fell silent.
She laid back down and stared into the dark, wide awake now, her mind a flipbook slideshow of everything she was always trying to forget, of hot summers picking raspberries in the center of a treeless farm, row bosses with polished walking sticks who made empty but s
inister threats of bruises on your legs if you didn’t quit yapping and start picking. Of cats that multiplied incessantly and dogs that crawled under porches for the last time in their lives. Of her own poisoned mother, and of Jimmy, in the car, waiting for her to return from the drugstore, ignorant of what was coming his way.
“How many times did it ring?” Lester stood in the open doorway, still dressed in the clothes he’d worn to Tiny’s. The dusting of moonlight filled in the dark spaces of his body; his mustard shirt completely untucked, hanging down over black trousers like a loose-fitting dress.
“Once,” she said.
“Only once? Are you sure? I thought I heard more.”
“It was one call, but it rang two times before it stopped.”
He leaned against the doorjamb and raked his fingers through his tangled mop of hair. He was exhausted, maybe still a little bit drunk.
He whispered, “Goddamn it.”
“Why’s that?”
He reached up and found the propane lamp and brought the room into a low, hissing, yellow light. “I gotta go out for a bit,” he said. “I’ll be an hour or two.”
Was it a friend, she wondered, someone who put their car in a ditch? Another woman somewhere, suddenly lonely for anyone she could find? The onion-nosed drunk signaling a fight? She watched him there in the doorway, and considered the firm grip his hand held on the jamb.
“Do you think you ought to be driving?”
“I don’t have a choice.” His eyes zeroed in on the car keys still on her nightstand. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “Don’t you worry about old Lester.”
Nadine wondered some more, but held on tight to the not knowing. To the hopeful notion that it was all nothing.
Lester went to the closet and dug out his flannel jacket and the pair of striped tennis shoes that he almost never wore. He was talking the whole time, to himself, she assumed, and then he finally sat on the edge of the bed and laid a hand on her leg, rubbing his fingers back and forth over the quilt, an old hand-stitched thing that Lester said had come from his mother before her fingers finally stopped working for her.
“Here’s the deal,” he said. “It’s likely I’m gonna have someone with me when I get back. Could be two people.”
Alright, now. This was something. She sat up in the bed and tried to find his expression in the low light, to trace the map of his face regarding all of this.
“It’d be a big help if you could make up the sofa bed with some blankets,” he said. “Put some food out. Nothing fancy.” As if fancy could even be a consideration.
“Who’s coming?” She decided this was information she ought to have.
“I don’t know yet,” he said. And when she drew in her breath and cocked her head, he added, “Don’t worry. It ain’t gonna be a murderer or bank robber or anything like that.” He patted her leg and got up from the bed. “I’ll give you the lowdown when I get back,” he said. And before he walked out, he added, “Sandwiches would be good. Maybe a pot of coffee.”
Nadine moved from the blankets to her robe and went to the kitchen and waited at the window, watching as one red rectangle bounced and shrunk from where the car had been to where it disappeared at the bottom of the hill. She considered that Lester likely had no idea he was operating with a single taillight. Then again it would be just like him to ignore something like that.
She dialed up the lantern before going to the pantry and slapping together a few peanut butter and margarine sandwiches. Then she pulled out the can of instant, fingering the plastic lid before finally deciding against it. To make coffee would require a fire, and she wasn’t up for the added work and the heat it would create for her. Besides, who in their right mind would want coffee at three in the morning?
After pulling out the sofa bed and covering the whole thing with a couple of moth-eaten, musty blankets she’d dug out of the closet, she wrapped herself up in the blue and white afghan and turned the recliner to face the window, where she would wait for Lester’s return.
There was nothing to see beyond the glass but the familiar landmarks her mind had already memorized from that spot. The edge of the porch. The front end of the long, black Plymouth with no hood and a cracked windshield. The crippled, wooden gate just before the dip in the road. They were invisible in the blackness, but she could still see them.
She rocked in the chair, and wondered what might be coming up that drive likely before sunrise. It was a mile and a half hike down to the main highway, which was really nothing more than a two-lane road that wound through a thousand acres of scrub and field, and forestry department-planted pine and fir. Seeing another car on that landscape was a rarity in daylight hours, likely a near impossibility at this time of night. Her head felt heavy and she let it fall back onto the cushion and closed her eyes.
For as long as she could remember Nadine had had trouble making it through the night. Sharp noises, and the touch of hands on her body, real or imagined, often broke her from her sleep, and she might find herself calling out to no one, or hooking her fingers at the air or into the skin of an unfortunate companion. But it had been some time since one of those incidents. While Lester was a man whose faults ran into the dozens as far as Nadine could see, he did not create in her the sense of trepidation, or uneasiness, that she’d grown used to over the years. With him, in this house (except for that phone) she could sleep through the night.
And yet.
What was it about men, she wondered. Maybe she was asking too much, or maybe she just kept catching all the wrong flies. But it seemed like they all had one side they liked to show the world, and another side hiding around the corner, just waiting to jump out.
“Nadine.”
She sprang upright in the chair, her leg cramping beneath the weight of her body. Lester stood in front of her, the low light of the lantern behind him casting the kitchen as a collage of streaks and shadows, and unsettling possibilities.
“There’s a pair of Chinamen outside in the car,” he said. “They’re gonna be staying here a couple nights. Till they continue on their way.”
“A Chinaman?”
“Two of ’em. And no, you can’t tell nobody they’re here.”
Here was an example, she admitted, where knowing a few details ahead of time would have been good. She rubbed her hands over her face, the skin dry and chalky, then used her fingers to comb through her hair, as if it mattered in the least how she looked right now.
“Do I get a say in any of this?”
“Not unless you got two grand to kick in, you don’t.”
She stood up and peered out the window, and she could see under the soft yellow of the dome light two faces in the back seat, gazing back at her.
“Are they wanted by the law?”
“They ain’t on the run from the cops, if that’s what you’re asking,” he said, and when Nadine took a breath to press him harder on it, he put up his hand. “Let’s just say,” he added, “that it ain’t likely the law is actively looking for em.”
Lester went out onto the porch and waved his arm, and before Nadine could get in another question, the two men appeared in the doorway, each of them holding a lumpy cloth bag at their feet.
Nadine stood with the recliner between her and them and raised her hand in a wave. Of course she didn’t know a single word of Chinese, not even hello or stop. The smaller of the two gave a little forced smile and nodded, but he didn’t move from his spot. There was no way of knowing how old either of them was, what with the bad light and all, though Nadine could never tell with people like this anyway. The bigger one did look a stretch older, and she imagined they might be a father and his son. Taking shelter from whatever it was Lester was being paid to help them escape.
“I don’t suppose they speak any English,” she said to Lester. He gave a lazy shrug and wandered into the kitchen, and the two men said nothing in response. Nadine assumed the answer.
“There’s sandwiches in the icebox,” she said. “I don’t know if they ea
t peanut butter.”
“Why wouldn’t they?” he called from the kitchen.
“I don’t know. I heard once they don’t have it over there. Maybe it’ll make them sick.” She looked at the little guy again and smiled.
Lester opened the icebox and brought out the plate and a pitcher of water and set it all on the table. He pulled a couple ceramic mugs from the shelf and added them to the spread. “I don’t see no coffee,” he said.
“Nope,” she said. “I didn’t get to it.”
Nadine moved herself around the chair at last and went to the couple and put out her hand and waited as they each took it and gave it a tired squeeze. “There’s food,” she said, touching her fingers to her lips. The older man stared at her dumbly, but the younger one nodded, and looked out to the kitchen. Nadine pointed at the table.
“And sleep,” she said, sweeping her hand at the pullout sofa as if it was some grand, ambitious creation of hers. When they both looked to the bedspread and the mound of pillows she’d crowded at the head, she announced that she was turning in herself and went off to the bedroom.
She crawled back under the quilt and lay there with the softness of the fabric under her chin, and the noise of cupboard doors opening and closing and Lester’s great, grating drone going on and on, who he thought he was talking to, she could not fathom. Finally, after what seemed like a week, he opened the door and creaked into the bedroom.
“Are they eating the sandwiches?” she asked.
“They’re picking at ’em,” he said. “They’re hungry, so it’s likely they’ll be gone by morning.”
“Good.”
“I’m talking about the sandwiches,” he said. “Not them.”
“I figured.” She reached over and smoothed the blanket beside her, and he sank down onto it, his back to her, still dressed in everything but his boots. “Do I get the honor of at least half an explanation?” she said.
He growled out a heavy sigh. “We’re a stopover is all,” he said. “People wanting to pass over the border without all the hassle.”