Dry Bones in the Valley: A Novel

by Tom Bouman

  I found Aub’s spread on the county map, and matched it to his ridge on the topo. The scales weren’t exactly the same, but close; I took a ruler and measured out the old man’s land, then scaled it down and drew it in red pencil on the topo map. Wrote Aub in the middle of it. It was a huge L-shaped plot taking up much of the ridge where we’d found the kid, and the eastern half of the next ridge to the south. From there I moved concentrically out, marking off parcels. The plot westerly-adjacent to Dunigan’s belonged to the Gradys, a family that had been in the area several generations. Mrs. Grady and and her son’s family lived side by side. Their place was all hills, some field, mostly forest. From there the ridge tapered off to the west and we had a subdivided piece of real estate; three parcels of about ten acres each radiated out like fingers, belonging to Wild Thyme families of long standing—Heslin, Moore, Loinsigh (“Lynch”).

  Continuing south, I marked off what used to be the Regan dairy, and was now a horse farm belonging to people named, evocatively, Bray. Their place fit into the crook of Aub Dunigan’s L-shaped land and was bordered by Route 189 on the southern edge. To the southeast, three fifteen-acre plots got us from the southern border of Aub’s land to Route 189. I wrote the names: Nolan, Weatherall, Sawicki.

  To the east of Dunigan’s plot was an impassable swamp at the foot of the steep ravine. The summer camp owned that. Camp Branchwater owned hundreds of acres in the township, including a lake and everything north of Fieldsparrow Road for at least three miles in either direction from Aub’s house. The boys who went there came from wealthy, conservative families up and down the East Coast; they sailed and fished on a private lake, played tennis and baseball, shot skeet and target. The manly arts. I marked Camp Branchwater off on my topo map. It was a start, and I had something to bring to Sheriff Dally in the morning.

  For a while I strained to decipher cautious talk on the county’s radio channels, what I could hear through the static. I looked through missing person reports in neighboring Pennsylvania counties, but couldn’t find anyone close. Even though I saw the JD just about every time I shut my eyes, it was the position of his body, the frozen mess of blood, bone, and tissue where his shoulder used to be, the missing eye. When I tried for details I could summon only a vague idea of what the boy actually looked like. He had been tallish, skinny, pale, and had black hair—could have been white or Latino, Asian a remote possibility. After a while it felt like a waste of time. I wondered what the sheriff was up to, and how Aub was faring. A few times I flipped through our radio channels and listened. I dialed my wayward deputy’s cell but it went straight to the message.

  I locked up and got in the truck and headed out. My first stop was the High-Thyme Tavern.

  The High-Thyme is a two-story inn on Walker Lake Road. It’s old, isolated, and was likely built where it was to distance it from the piety of the county seat. The dirt lot was muddy and rutted with tire tracks. The radio car wasn’t there, and neither was George’s crappy yellow pickup among the many other spattered, rust-edged vehicles. When I pushed open the heavy wooden door and stepped inside, I heard someone say, “Aw, shit.” I had to laugh. I took a stool next to a wrinkled old lady, who smiled at me. It took me a moment, but I eventually placed her as the seamstress who had reversed the collars on my uniform shirts when they got frayed the year before. I ordered a beer and everyone went about their business. The bartender hadn’t seen George all day. I took a turn around the bar to see if I could find any of George’s buddies before I pressed on.

  The tavern is still technically an inn. The upstairs rooms are occupied by one dead poltergeist and a collection of living ones, poor semi-itinerant folks. I assume some crank gets smoked up there, even crack, for all I know. Downstairs in the public area there are three large connected rooms—a dining room on one end, a big U-shaped bar in the middle, and a dance floor with a stage in the back on the other side. It was a good happy-hour crowd and each room was occupied. Around the corner I ran into the township mechanic, John Kozlowski, who also hadn’t seen my deputy and had heard nothing from him.

  The next place to look for George was his trailer park on 37. It was a ten-minute drive from the bar. As trailer parks go, his was pretty nice. That may have been due to the Seventh-Day Adventist church next door, a corrugated steel warehouse painted white, with a steeple cobbled on. It was full every Sabbath. I didn’t know whether George was a member of the congregation there, and if so, whether he believed as they do. We never talked about it. The church and trailer park are both tucked in an open valley with a tree line marking where January Creek wends through. As night deepened I bumped to a halt in front of my deputy’s trailer. His yellow truck was there. On either side of his front door, two wooden half barrels contained devastated geraniums, a collection of cigarette butts, and a crushed tallboy. I knocked, but no answer came. I got back in the truck.

  Driving down 37 toward the part of the county where the Stiobhards lived, I was kept on the path by the skeletal trees to my left and the steep black hills to my right. A handful of stars spread out above me in the gap, looking like a watercolor painting because of the mist—white mist that I caught in my headlights when I passed through gullies, and collected as droplets on my windshield every mile or so. The snow was still melting. It would be gone by morning. The radio offered no opinions.

  I had the feeling of things getting carried away from me. The worry took many forms and faces, moving in and out of recognition and time. Polly made a cameo, Polly, my wife, who died in Wyoming, when there was nothing we could do. And that let the black dog in.

  If you’re in a mood, turning onto Old Account Road won’t cheer you up. It’s little more than a dirt track that the township doesn’t maintain in the winter or any of the other seasons. Why, I don’t know. I guess there are probably a lot of people below the poverty line living on it, and people who don’t pay taxes. The road was like a creek bed; that night, you could see great ribbons of muddy water cut through it, right down the middle, exposing fins of blue shale. My shocks whined, even at ten miles an hour. While Fieldsparrow Road meandered through wide-open spaces and rounded ridges, Old Account Road gave access to territory that felt compressed and crowded and too steep to live on. There wasn’t a place in the township that wasn’t hilly, but everyone referred to this particular area as “the Heights.” I knew from hunting there that every second step you took, you might also be ankle-deep in a stream. Even with the knife-edge ridges and the hollows in between, some of the blue and white natural gas ribbons fluttered optimistically on trailheads either side of the road. The whole Heights were interconnected with trails used with as much regularity as the county routes. Trails leading from home to home, spot to spot, hidden places you’d never see from any road. A decent outdoorsman with sympathetic neighbors could run me around for weeks.

  Around the third bend was a gritty driveway marked by a mailbox in the shape of a tractor, with one of those blue plastic cubbies beneath it to get the Pennysaver; behind a thick wall of woods was Michael and Bobbie Stiobhard’s place, the most fixed abode that the Stiobhard family had. Their two sons and a daughter revolved around this little homestead perched on a slope and found themselves semipermanent situations nearby. I weighed my options: it was unlikely Danny would be here, knowing I would be looking for him. Yet, he was hurt and in need of care. It’d be foolish not to at least check. I continued past the driveway like I wasn’t going to stop, rounded a curve, killed my lights, and pulled over.

  Closing my car door softly, I stepped off the road and into the woods. Yes, I had no warrant, and I hope you can forgive me. The ground was soggy, but a carpet of snow and wet leaves kept me from squelching too much in the mud as I walked, taking irregular steps to throw off anybody listening. Heel-toe, heel-toe, taking my time. There was a light on in Michael and Bobbie’s house. I approached it along the clearest and driest path I could find. As I got near, I reached a patch of prickers that seemed to have no end. I did my best to move quietly, but a thorn caught and th
en popped out of my uniform trousers, sounding like a firecracker in the stillness. I heard the abrupt chain-rattle of a dog going to red alert in the yard. I froze. When I heard the chain clink again, that’s when I moved away from the sound, toward the front. It wasn’t as I remembered: not only was the house itself different, but when I was a kid the Stiobhards had sedans up on blocks, appliances saved for parts, mysterious crates, and so on. Now it was a pale empty expanse, save for the camper set up behind a modular log cabin, a prefab home replacing what had been a ramshackle farmhouse up until about ten years ago.

  As soon as I reached the edge of the yard, white light blinded me. They caught me with a high beam, the way unsporting hunters spotlight deer at night. And just like a deer, I was rooted to the ground for a moment. Long enough for a woman’s voice to call from the house, “I see you, motherfucker!”

  I tried to step out of the beam but couldn’t move fast enough. When I turned to run, Danny Stiobhard was there in the woods, not six feet away. I had never heard him. The spot cut off and I was blind, Danny’s afterimage moving with me as I turned my head and waited for my eyes to adjust. A gun barrel pressed into the side of my neck. A hand grabbed at my holster, undid the snap, and my .40 was gone.

  He said, “I have to show you something.”

  “Danny, Jesus!” I said. “Think about this.”

  “No need to talk. You’ll drive us.”

  I walked toward where I’d left the truck. Danny followed close behind me. I slipped once and steadied myself against a narrow tree trunk. My hand came away wet and coated with grit. We hopped over the rushing water in the ditch and stood by my truck. “You got one chance,” I said. “Return my weapon. Christ, you can drop it in the ditch, for all I care. Just give it back and walk away.”

  “You drive,” he said. “It’s not far.”

  In the truck’s interior light I got a look at the snub-nosed revolver Danny had pointed at me. It was a black .38. When he adjusted his gun hand I caught a glimpse of yellowing athletic tape on the handle. It wasn’t a beautiful weapon. It did look practical. He was dressed in a waterproof hunting coat and a camouflage cap. In the close confines of the car, his strange scent was in every breath I took.

  I wanted to talk, as if to remind him I was a human being and maybe steer him away from whatever he had planned. “Where are we going, man?”

  The knuckles on his gun hand whitened. I chanced a look at his face and saw desperation there, his good eye raw and troubled. We bumped along in the dark, deeper and higher into the hills. He pointed me to an old logging road about five miles in, and I turned onto it, bare branches scratching at my windshield and the sides of my truck. In my headlights, I saw fresh tire tracks in the mud and snow.

  If it happened in an instant, it wouldn’t be bad.

  No, I didn’t mind dying; what I didn’t want was to die after fighting Danny Stiobhard and losing. I’d have to win. My blood raced as I pictured the ways it might touch off—if he raised the gun to my head while I was still behind the wheel, if we stepped out of the truck, and so on. I thought about spinning inside his arm and getting control of the weapon. I thought of the mousegun in my pocket.

  Danny knew what was on my mind. “I don’t want to kill you, Henry.”

  “That’s nice to hear.”

  “I’m not going to hang for this.”

  “Hang for what?”

  We continued in the dark. The logging road descended into a cavernous clearing, a hollow. In one swift motion Danny was out of the car and around the front. I braked so as not to hit him. He kept his pistol on me the whole time, came around and opened my door as I was putting the truck in park. The parking brake handle was close enough to the butt of the tactical shotgun holstered behind the passenger seat—something I wasn’t sure Danny had noticed—that I considered reaching for it, but dismissed that as a quick way to lose the fight.

  Metal and glass reflected in my headlights. We were standing in the neighborhood junkyard: automobiles and appliances, bottles and cans, mounds of full trash bags, and my deputy’s patrol car. I started toward it, but Danny stopped me.

  “Just listen, Henry,” he said. “I didn’t have to bring you here.”

  “I’ll make sure they put you down like a dog. Step aside.”

  Danny considered this and the air went out of him. Never taking his eye off me, he backed toward a rusted oil drum with several bullet holes in it, took my .40 out of his pocket, and dropped the weapon in; it splashed in the standing water and thumped when it hit bottom. Never letting me out of his line of vision, he stepped out of the yellow high beams. Then he was lost in the dark. I heard movement in the brush, then quick footfalls in what sounded like water. In an instant, those sounds were gone too.

  I pulled out the shotgun and my own spotlight from the compartment under the passenger seat and made a slow circle, holding the light in my left hand, the handle of the shotgun in my right with the barrel crossed over my left forearm. For all the good it did, it also made me a perfect target. I killed the spot and my headlights too. When I knocked over the oil drum to retrieve my weapon, a few gallons of water rushed out. Had to upend the barrel completely for the .40 to tumble out. I holstered it wet, twisted on my Maglite, and walked to George’s radio car.

  Whoever had laid him on his side in the back seat had done so with care, but he was dead, his weapons gone. The back of his head was matted and bloody, as was the rolled-up uniform coat somebody’d tucked under him as a pillow. His eyes were half open and there was an exit wound through his cheekbone.

  Where Danny Stiobhard had disappeared into the woods, a narrow stream emerged from the earth. Stones covered in bright green moss marked the springhead, and the stream continued down into the dark. I followed it until it branched, then stopped to listen: heard the water at my feet, burbling onward to wherever it went. Condensation dripping from trees to a saturated forest floor covered with wet leaves. In the distance, a car moving fast and steady on what was probably 37, and a little closer than that, what could have been a four-wheeler. I headed back to the hollow. Had to drive about ten minutes in the hills before I could find a clear enough spot to radio the county.

  HUNTING DEER since age eleven, I’ve gotten my share, but Father was a nose-to-the-ground dog when it came to the red menace. Need made him that way. A few years back, he and Ma packed it up for North Carolina to be near my sister Mag’s family, bringing his dominion over the whitetail population of Wild Thyme Township to an end; at the time he left, the number of deer he claimed to have shot was in the two-hundreds.

  As I have mentioned, one of his hunting partners was Michael Stiobhard, Danny’s father. Hunting deer isn’t usually a solitary pursuit. Depending on the season, it takes at least two men but preferably more: one to sit still and wait in a tree stand or some elevated, downwind spot, and a couple more to drive the buck to where the sitter is. You want your partners to have sense and focus in the woods. If you’re lucky you’ll have a good tracker—a guy who can read a place’s changing story every day, the story of where the deer is that you want. You want a guy who knows the buck personally.

  Mike Stiobhard and Father had both worked for the same machine shop in Wild Thyme, burring the edges off steel and aluminum parts that would then be shipped away to become pieces of something, nobody knew what. Every day Father’s hands came home laced with fine scratches from the parts’ edges, scratches filled with black dust that wouldn’t ever wash completely clean. He took me into the shop once when I was about six and let me try the sandblaster—the fingers of the rubber gloves were clammy from the guy using it before. It was thrilling to press the trigger and feel the force of the sand, heavy and permanent, and see it put a shine on a small aluminum square. He let me keep the square and I still have it. But the shop closed, and hunting changed from a pastime to a necessity.

  I’m not sure Father and Mike were friends, exactly, but they were cut from the same olive drab. Good trackers, full of methods. Mike used to be able to stan
d stock-still under a tree, camoed to the eyelids, and call a deer in by whirling a white sock around, moving only his wrist. Father had a trick of confusing deer with balloons that he hasn’t shared with me yet. They had their secret ways, but mostly they were patient and determined.

  About twenty-five years ago Mike and Father had got a beautiful eight-point, and the Stiobhards were cooking a roast and asked us to dinner to share it. I knew Danny from school but we weren’t friends—you’d think the other children calling us both woodchucks would have brought us together in solidarity, but I regret to say it didn’t. Still feel bad about it. But when I was ten years old I saw things differently, and wasn’t thrilled about dining with the Stiobhards; stepping in their house would be a for-all-time exclamation point on what everyone had been saying I was. I might as well have accepted it back then and saved trouble. Thankfully, Ma and Father had whacked enough manners into me so I don’t think my true feelings showed to my grown-up hosts, though Danny probably guessed how much I wanted to be there.

  Upon entering, Ma and Father were handed cans of beer and Mag and I were dragged into the kids’ bedroom lair. The room was so small that even a few objects could crowd it, especially with the two sets of bunks, one of which had a sheet hanging over it, an illusion of privacy for Jennie Lyn, the daughter. After a show-and-tell of scuffed toys, we thumped outside to a rope swing where, in failing November light, Mag and I watched as the three Stiobhard children took turns swinging each other around and trying to pull or knock the one on the rope down. I was too chickenshit to join in and nobody asked Mag. No grass grew on the ground below the swing; the dirt was hard-packed, and knobs of oak root jutted up. Jennie Lyn, the youngest and also a girl, was thrown to the ground no less than four times. The fourth time, she got up crying. But she didn’t run back into the house, she just stood there huffing until she stopped, and then jumped back in the fray, popping an older brother neatly in the teeth.