Dry Bones in the Valley: A Novel

by Tom Bouman

  We were called in to supper, and I remember tucking my legs under a tablecloth with floral embroidery around its edges. There was a feast on the table. Mag and I had eaten plenty of game at home, including squirrel pie and, in lean times, brown stew I suspected contained real woodchuck, but we had dreaded this meal the way kids dread most cooking that’s not their own mother’s. Still, it looked and smelled good. Venison roasted brown, surrounded by copper-colored potatoes. Pickled green beans provided a suggestion of a vegetable, and in a basket, probably fifty yellow rolls that magically looked both baked and fried; I’d heard Danny refer to these as “overnight rolls.” We bowed our heads for the blessing and then Mike Stiobhard took up a fork and knife to carve. Danny, sitting one away from me, grabbed the basket of overnight rolls and made to pass them to me—doubtless they were his favorite, a special treat that he wanted to share. Mike saw it and clouted his son on the ear with a sound like a branch snapping underfoot. The basket of rolls fell to the table, dislodging a spoon from a bowl full of mustard. A silence settled as Danny rubbed at the side of his head. We stared at our plates for a moment. I cut my eyes right to Father, who had not looked away, but instead held Mike in a gaze that wasn’t embarrassed or hot, but perfectly cool. Turning to Danny, he said, “You all right, bud?”

  Danny was confused for a moment, as if he knew he should say nothing and keep his eyes to himself. But Father was a guest and an adult, and manners required an answer. He managed, “That wasn’t nothing.”

  The table began to murmur again once dishes were passed, and we soon found conversation again. But nothing tasted as good as it looked after that; we Farrells never went back there, and though Father continued to hunt with Mike, Danny and I still weren’t friends at school.

  SHERIFF DALLY HAD met me in darkness where the trail to the junkyard joined the road. He was trying not to look tired. Patrol cars continued to scream along 37 and then lurch up Old Account. He suggested I go home; someone would be by to get my statement. I said no. He attempted to order me away but I dismissed him with a wave.

  “We’ve got our K-9 unit on the way,” he said, “and part of a SERT team. I understand you wanting to stay, but we don’t need you.”

  “A dog won’t help. He’s covered in liquid fence.” Dally looked blank, so I explained. “Coyote scent, probably. My truck still stinks of it. I know you’ve got to try, but he may be long gone by now and a dog won’t help. We can’t wait for people to get their stories straight. We should knock on doors and try to find a witness.”

  “All right,” said the sheriff, as a black E350 pulled up. “All right, stay. Find Jackson out by the Stiobhards’ place. Do nothing until you hear from me, you follow?”

  The sheriff left my side to speak with the van’s driver. I took the opportunity to head back down the trail to where Palmer and a couple forensic techs were combing the area around George’s patrol car; a generator thrummed, powering construction lights. I sat still on the hood of an abandoned car, well outside of the perimeter, and watched. In just a minute or two, a group of black silhouettes entered the floodlit area. Four men in all black, with vests, knee pads, and trousers bloused into high boots approached Palmer. Two of them carried what looked like M5s, and one had a tactical shotgun. As Palmer led them around the junk heap to where they’d marked my last sighting of Danny, the man with the shotgun, taking the measure of his surroundings, stopped short when he saw my form, peered closely, and nudged his neighbor. By the time they turned my direction I was back in the woods and out of sight.

  I gave the SERT team a good head start in case they were using NVS, and followed their tracks into the vale. If Danny was still in the area, he could avoid them, but he might not expect me following. The officers’ tracks headed west, so I pushed a little east of them, back toward the Stiobhards’, listening for the little snaps and wet footfalls that told me where their four-man line was to my right.

  A whitetail buck is going to see and hear and smell you before you know where he is. You can push him down into a white pine patch. He won’t like it if you follow him in, so he’ll move up into some tag where he thinks you won’t want to go. With luck and patience you’ll push him to where your partner can take a shot. Four men weren’t going to cover much ground compared to what Danny could do up here, and they were heading toward habitation. I followed them across a dirt road and caught up outside a single-wide, where they were pulling out a family—a long-haired man and his wife stood with their hands on their heads as the team leader addressed them, and one of the SERT guys had a struggling boy of about ten by the elbow, chicken-winged up. The remaining two made entry into the trailer. I gave up following them.

  The Heights concealed much besides Danny Stiobhard, and the sheriff certainly knew that. An opportunity to kick a lab or two down—without papers, without consequences—might not arise again for some time. Dally would never have admitted to this agenda but I’m sure that’s what he was thinking.

  My attention was undivided. I slipped through the woods to my vehicle and drove back on Old Account. Deputy Jackson had parked his car on Mike and Bobbie’s lawn, leaving deep muddy tracks; he had kept his lights spinning, and stood glowering at the house. I pulled up in the yard and got out, pausing long enough to ask him to turn off his flashers. Before he could stop me, I was knocking on the aluminum screen door and pulling it open all at once.

  It was not the original house I remembered, but it contained what looked like the same hook rugs and religious watercolors. A prefab log cabin had been set up on the original stone foundation, and two garden sheds were tacked on the side, with mismatched windows installed, aftermarket. Glancing back out the front door, I could see red-and-blue lights through the trees; I counted six so far. Mike and Bobbie sat side by side on a black leather couch that could only be secondhand. They had a couple worn chairs in there, heaped with folded clothes.

  Mike started to rise, but the effort subsided into a gesture. I touched the brim of my hat and asked who else was in the house.

  “Just Jennie Lyn,” said Bobbie.

  “Jennie Lyn,” I called. “Come out where I can see you, please.”

  A floorboard in the kitchen spoke and a ropy woman in her thirties appeared in the living room doorway, hanging her hands on the lintel. She was dressed in camo, same as her brother, and her narrow face was shadowed by long sandy hair. “Evening,” she told me, and there was something ugly in the way she said it that I can’t explain.

  “Coffee, Jennie-girl,” said Mike. His hair had turned from black to silver since the last time I’d seen him.

  I turned again to look out the window. County and state cars bumped by. In the yard, Deputy Jackson’s top half had disappeared into his driver’s-side window; doubtless he was raising Sheriff Dally on their two-way and telling him what I was up to.

  “We just have a short time here,” I said, turning to Mike and Bobbie, and speaking loudly enough that Jennie Lyn could hear me in the kitchen. “Jennie, come on. Come out.” Danny’s sister refused to join us in the living room, but met me halfway by sitting down at the kitchen table in my sight, hands wrapped around a coffee mug.

  “I’m going to head you off a moment, Henry,” said Mike. “If you mean to go after my son, you’ve got it wrong. Danny and George weren’t friendly, I grant, but their problem is with a woman named Tracy Dufaigh, nothing to do with this. Danny is no killer.”

  “I can’t take that on faith. Tell me. Anything that can help, anything you’d prefer to keep from the county. What happened to my deputy: that’s my concern. I’ll get there with or without you, but if I get no help, I swear to God I’ll tear down everything I see.”

  Their storm door squeaked open and Deputy Jackson stepped in, removing his hat. “Evening,” he said. He gave me a look that everyone in the room must have caught. “Officer, you are needed elsewhere.” He held an arm out to lead me through the door.

  I made him wait. “Jennie Lyn, I’ll take that coffee. Don’t worry, I’ll return the
mug. You know where I live if I don’t.”

  Jennie emerged from the kitchen holding a chipped mug with a band of yellow roses on it. I took one last look at my hosts Mike and Bobbie, hoping to see something in their faces. Bobbie wore thick glasses with large frames, and that didn’t help. The Stiobhards weren’t like most people I knew, but some things are universal; they didn’t behave like parents whose son had just killed a man. Maybe that’s what Danny had made them believe. Or maybe it hadn’t sunk in yet. “Anything you can tell me,” I said, and left.

  As Deputy Jackson and I watched, the ambulance carrying George Ellis swayed back and forth as it descended Old Account Road. “Go home,” Jackson said. “Write your report. Dally told me to tell you.”

  I got in my truck but I didn’t go home. Old Account Road climbs the south side of a ridge and, once it hits the top, teeters along the summit for several miles west. I knew the road well, so when I rounded the last curve before the long straight, I turned off all my lights—my flashers and my headlights too—and downshifted to avoid using brake lights. At a dairy farm near the western border of Wild Thyme Township the road makes a Y. I descended the south slope and passed through woods into a swamp, pulled off to the side, and cut my engine. Checked was the shotgun loaded and stepped out with it. My door clicked shut quietly but it was still too loud; every noise I made down there was going to be.

  All around me, ragged pine trunks, softened by decay, strained to stay above the water’s surface. The swamp spread for acres, its edges choked with pussy willow and reed. The beavers always found a way to dam it so that every spring the road was submerged, and the township had to wade in and break the dam up. Local hunters knew that deer favored the swamp for its ample cover and access to water. But if you knew that, you also knew that though the Stiobhards didn’t own it, they considered it their personal grounds. I’d received a couple calls in past years from fellows who’d been cursed and chased away from there, wanting to know what could be done about it.

  I knew of one way to get where I wanted to go: a stone causey leading through the rushes. Father had taken me once. I pushed down a strand of barbed wire strung between two red pines and hopped into the shadows. Strange how ground covered in pine needles always sounds hollow. I skirted the swamp’s bank on the northern side until the scant light caught the pale branches of a black alder cluster, trees that grew only man-height and no higher so close to the swamp, and produced bright red berries you shouldn’t eat. I ducked under the thicket of branches, snapping only a dozen or two. Finding my footing on the rubble that formed the causey, I began a slow crouching progress into the depths of the swamp, switching the shotgun from hand to hand.

  A smear of snow lingered where the sun hadn’t hit the trail that day, some boot tracks in it; to my left and right clumps of bulrush had gotten a head start on spring, bright emerald even in the dark. I crossed channels of water, and they ran deeper and clearer and faster than you might imagine, feeding the rusty belly of the swamp. The water moved much faster than I. Up ahead there was an island where a stand of old-growth pine remained, too difficult for farmers to have reached; I was headed there.

  There was no red glow of an open fire ahead, no hiss and pop, but the smell of woodsmoke told me I was close. Willows got so thick I had to crawl on my belly to get past them, shotgun out front. My heart was thudding, I tell you what. It seemed impossible I wouldn’t be heard. I made myself slow. All the stars in the sky might have passed over me while I dragged myself over those stones. My front was soaked, and my elbows too from digging in with them. The light on the island was small and uneven: a flame in a lantern. It made the night’s blackness appear deeper as I emerged from the brush and lay flat against a bank covered in pine needles. Not sixty yards distant stood a hunting cabin the size of one of those garden sheds that come in a kit; a metal chimney puffed smoke into the pine canopy. A window on each side of the cabin let out that flickering light I’d seen on my way in. How they’d got the thing to where it was, I don’t know. I listened for voices and heard only a hush of wind in the pines.

  A round whacked into the tree next to me, some six feet above from my head, and I heard the shot slap out after the fact. Some instinct had already curled me up tight to the ground. I called out, “This is Officer Henry Farrell! You shoot again, I’ll shoot back.”

  After a pause, a distant voice said, “Didn’t know it was you.”

  If you’ve been through a shitty little deployment like I have, you learn not to appreciate being shot at, even if the round wasn’t meant to hit home. I stood and strode onto the island, not knowing whether I was shaking from anger or fear. Other than the lantern pulsing, it was black under those big trees; I stepped high to avoid the roots crossing my path, and strained my eyes for movement. I thought of how George had been shot, how it could come from anywhere. When I got to within ten feet of the cabin and the cabin’s occupant still hadn’t revealed himself, I stopped and turned slowly in a circle. To my right a fire ring was surrounded by logs for sitting, and everywhere else was pine trees, some of them toppled into the swamp, with their root systems turned on end like colossal circular saw blades half buried in the earth.

  The voice murmured to my left. “You wouldn’t be trying to bring me in for something?”

  “Looking for your brother.”

  Part of a fallen tree moved. I twisted my Maglite on and just caught a glint off Alan Stiobhard’s glasses before he said, “Please cut that.”

  When I did as he asked Alan approached me in silence. He stopped about ten feet off, clad in camo and a boonie hat, his deer rifle cradled sideways in his arms. Looked like maybe a .243. Alan was the eldest brother. He stood about six-six and was both taller and narrower than Danny. He had a beard longer than mine, and you rarely saw his eyes unprotected by thick square glasses with black frames. The other thing was, he almost never visited town. His retiring nature invited rumor and blame-laying: that he was a poacher and a house thief who sought ammunition, cash, and liquor, in that order; that he fathered a kid on a teenage dropout and sometime prostitute fifteen years his junior outside of Rosedale; that a few years back he’d slit the throat of a meth-dealing thug named Wesley Crummy and sunk his body in the swamp. Wesley was before my time. He had never been found and it wasn’t my intention to start looking that night.

  “George Ellis has been shot,” I said, nodding at his .243. “What the fuck you think you’re doing?” Alan pulled the bolt open, and the spent shell pinwheeled into shadow. I pointed my shotgun to the side.

  “Poor George,” Alan said, his voice soft and slight. “I’m sorry about that.”

  “So you heard.”

  “’Twasn’t Brother Danny who let George in on the big secret. I can tell you that.”

  “Danny’s been here, then.” Behind me, footfalls dropped as gently as water from an icicle, moving through the dark toward the causey. As I turned, I heard Alan slide the bolt of his .243 home.

  “You go after him, I’ll cut you in half. Now hold that difference-maker out at your side.” I did as told, and he took the shotgun and slung it into the darkness, where it thumped and skidded across the bed of pine needles. “Pull out your sidearm there. Drop it and I’ll keep it safe for you.” I did so. He approached.

  When he slung his rifle up and bent to retrieve the .40 I drove an elbow hard as I could into his face. He toppled onto his back and just had time to chamber a round and point the handgun up at me when I landed on him, whanging my own head against his and tasting copper. The .40 never went off, and I had it pinned between my arm and side, my other forearm under his chin. I could feel him trying to reach his hands together to transfer the pistol behind me, so I put all my weight on his throat and he made a desperate sound, a high gurgle, and I felt the .40 drop.

  The world went white and silent. It took me a moment to know I’d been hit upside the head with something and that I no longer had control of Alan. I reached into my pocket and found the .22 mousegun. When Alan reappeared in
the glow surrounding the hunting cabin, the little pistol snapped in my hand, startling me. A stone the size of a rabbit dropped from Alan’s grasp. He swatted at his shoulder as if stung, then reeled a bit.

  “Jesus Christ, Henry. You could have killed me.”

  “What’d you . . . what’d you do?” I reached up to the side of my head, expecting to find blood. There wasn’t much. I kept the .22 pointed in his direction and we glared at each other, each heaving for breath.

  “Might as well come in, have a drink,” Alan said. “Danny’s got enough of a start by now, and I’ve got to take care of this.” I picked up the .40 and holstered it; he didn’t stop me, so I didn’t stop him taking his rifle along.

  We approached the cabin and I fought an urge to kneel and vomit. The cabin wasn’t fixed to the ground, and stood on wooden runners, presumably the easier to tow it. Something about that seemed wrong, and though the correct response to the wrongness would have been to vomit, I held it in. Hanging from the doorknob was a two-foot northern pike, gutted, its crooked jaw full of fangs. “Breakfast,” said Alan, hooking the fish with a finger through the gill. At that, I did puke. Alan stepped inside and let me do it alone.

  In the cabin, the potbelly stove was warm and leaked smoke. Alan gestured to a folding camp chair near the stove, and I took it. He swept a sleeping bag aside and sat on the cot. There wasn’t room for hardly anything else: a couple pairs of waders, a change of clothes hanging from a nail on the back of the door, a rod and tackle, a couple old books missing jackets. Racked above the door, an over-under shotgun and a muzzle-loader. There was one empty rack where presumably the .243 went. Alan set the deer rifle beside him on the cot. “I’m not going in. You understand?”