by Tom Bouman
I helped her limp to the truck, retrieving a battered Springfield 9mm from a compartment in the four-wheeler on our way.
I drove for Mike and Bobbie’s fast as I could, the cab smelling like blood and burning plastic and a hint of gasoline. JL had time to talk. “I don’t know who killed George. If I did, I’d tell you,” she said. I didn’t buy that. “But you might like to know it was kids who stoned the sheriff’s deputy.”
“Oh? That makes sense.”
“Yeah, you heroes dragged a lot of people out of bed last night. Moms and sisters and little fuckin brothers. You made insults to the people here. Anyway, they’re just kids, so I’m not saying their names.”
“As your conscience dictates.” We turned on to Old Account Road. “I’ll tell you what: any more attacks on police up here, I’m coming straight to you.”
Jennie Lyn shrugged. “Just you play fair, Officer.”
“Always.” We had a minute or so left in the drive. I looked at JL sidelong. “You hear from Alan lately?”
“No, why?”
I couldn’t tell whether to believe her. “I don’t know.” Another silence fell. I said, “That kid we found up on the Dunigan ridge.”
She didn’t meet my eyes. “Aub probably did him.”
I wasn’t expecting that. “Why Aub?”
But Jennie Lyn’s face had closed. I sensed a different kind of anger in her, slower and colder—didn’t know what it was about, but it was clear I wasn’t going to hear any more on that subject, not then.
We rounded a bend and saw several trucks parked half off the road on either side of Mike and Bobbie’s driveway. “Motherfuck,” JL said. “You got to uncuff me, Henry.”
“You need to stay here.”
“You kidding?” Hands behind her back, she twisted toward me, displaying a dark bloodstain—chin to chest—that almost disappeared into her camouflage jacket. “You can’t leave me cuffed, Henry! I heard something about George. I did hear something.”
A rifle shot cracked, followed by two more.
“What? Be quick,” I said.
“You’ll uncuff me?”
“You’ll stay in the fuckin truck if I do?”
“I’ll stay here. I swear it.” Jennie Lyn turned, presenting her shackled wrists, which I freed against my better judgment. “Brother Danny said he had an idea who. Someone close.”
“That’s it, ‘someone close’?”
“Someone George was fuckin, some girl? I don’t know, I didn’t know George.”
“Lock the doors and get down. I won’t bring you in tonight, but I need to hear more. If you want to help your brother—”
“I’ll be waiting.”
It was dark on the road. The raised voices I heard changed the night into something smaller. I made for the lights of Mike and Bobbie’s house through the trees—electric lights and something flickering like a torch, but brighter, what looked like a road flare. I didn’t trust my eyes. Since Alan had whacked me one on the head, my relationship to light had changed. Sometimes I saw too much, and it felt like I was seeing my own pain. Other times, what should have been plain before me was shrouded and confused. As I trotted up the driveway, a shadow stepped out of the forest and into my path. A man—a large one—asked me who I was. I took note of the rifle barrel over his right shoulder.
“This is Officer Farrell,” I said, stepping closer, and put my hand to my hip. “Lay it down.”
“Oh. Just got this deer rifle. Ain’t got the magazine in. It’s Barry,” he said. Up close Barry Nolan’s eyes looked more pink and puffy than ever before, and I smelled a barley scent of beer on him. “Jesus,” he said. “Glad you’re here. This is turning into a goddamn mess. It ain’t what I had in mind. Anyway, you caught me on the way out.”
“How many of you are there?”
“The five of us went out looking for Danny Stiobhard. Then we got two woodchucks just pulled up on ATVs behind the house. It’s somewhat of a standoff. Shit, I came in—I came in someone else’s truck, but he’s about to get left.”
“Just wait right here,” I said, and continued up the drive.
Nolan shrugged. “Like I said, it wasn’t what I had in mind.”
From the house, two shots thwacked out. They sounded close enough that training and instinct kicked in and I hit the dirt.
I stood, and when I reached the edge of the yard, I saw that I had been right, that the pulsing light was a road flare, bright white and searing a black patch in the middle of Mike and Bobbie’s lawn. Nearer the perimeter of the woods, there were fresh sprays of dirt in the half-frozen grass. Something didn’t look right about the house; all the lights in the living room were out, and it took me a moment to realize that where the flare should have been reflecting on the big picture window, there was only darkness.
A voice in the woods to my right called out, “Listen, fuckhead, just give us John and we’ll go.”
Another rifle shot erupted from the dark window, and was met with curses from the trees near the edge of the yard. Someone whispered loud enough for me to hear, “Shut up your mouth. You’re giving him a target.”
I walked to the middle of the lawn and stood close enough to the flare that my eyes stung. I held up my badge and turned in a slow circle, announcing myself. “Everyone lay your weapons down and come out of where you are,” I called. No answer came from the woods. And then I heard several men crashing through the brush toward the road. Keeping squarely in Mike’s field of fire, I turned to chase them down.
From the house, Mike called out, “Henry-boy? Got a friend of yours in here.”
I stopped before I hit the tree line. As the pickups’ engines started, I made my choice. “Okay, Mike. Coming in. Better lay your weapon down.”
As I climbed the steps, a movement to the right caught my eye. Without having made a sound, a gaunt young man dressed in camo emerged from the trees on the east side of the house; not looking at me, but not exactly looking away, he returned a blade to his boot. As he did so, another face, hollowed out by drug use and hard labor, emerged from the darkness in the trees and stared at me frankly. The two young men turned and melted back into the woods. I reckoned they had been a minute away from giving the county several more bodies to keep cool. I stepped inside, giving the dog straining against its chain a wide berth.
Mike met me in the living room, looking regal in a tartan bathrobe that almost reached his knees. A gently smoking .30-06 stood up against the wall near the busted window. The living room was dark, but the kitchen was lit, and framed in the doorway I saw township mechanic John Kozlowski sitting at the table, a picture of calm.
“Move slow, now,” Mike said.
As I stepped into the kitchen, I saw why. Pressed up against the base of John’s skull were the barrels of a shotgun; at the other end of it stood Bobbie Stiobhard in bare feet and a patched nightgown. She looked stern and matronly as ever, but her arms were shaking.
Somewhere behind the house, two ATVs kicked off; through a window I watched their lights meander into the trees and gone.
“Bobbie,” I said, “I’m going to sit here across from John, and you can lower that.”
She looked at her husband, who reached out and gently pulled the shotgun away from her. She excused herself to find a sweater to cover up.
“Now,” I said, “what’s all this?”
Here is what happened: Mike and Bobbie were settled in and watching a movie when a stone passed through their front window. Mike sent his wife to the rear of the house, while he retrieved his .30-06 and the road flare. Lighting and flipping the flare out of where his window used to be, he caught the forms of several men lurking in the yard, and sent warning shots in their direction. The men retreated to the trees, and from relative safety began to fight with their mouths. Bobbie was able to reach a friend of Jennie Lyn’s on the phone. Meanwhile, John Kozlowski, emboldened by drink, tried a flanking maneuver to see inside the house, and wound up sitting at the kitchen table. Without Bobbie’s shotgun barre
l improving his posture, he looked defeated.
I asked Mike, “Did anyone fire at you, fire at the house, show any weapons?”
“I like to not give them the chance,” he said. “They seem to think Danny shot your deputy, too. How’d they get that, I want to know?”
“Not from me.” In the kitchen, a birdsong clock struck ten with a cheery recording of a nightingale. “So what do you want to do?”
Mike pondered his prisoner, while John sat, arms folded, and wouldn’t meet his eyes. “I can get a man up to fix the window. He don’t work for free, though.”
“Send me a bill,” John said. His tone turned plaintive. “The rock, it wasn’t me . . .”
“But we got you and we don’t got them.” Mike leaned over the table so he could force eye contact with Kozlowski. “Surely you had some rifle with you when you came, a custom Weatherby, maybe, big hunter like you? I don’t see one here. You leave it in the backyard, maybe?”
It took John a while to answer. “No,” he managed, “no rifle.”
Mike looked pleased. “Don’t come up here again or you may not come down. I’m easygoing but I can’t speak for my sons or them they run around with.” Bobbie reappeared in the kitchen. “You find some cardboard for the window? Where the hell is Jennie-girl, anyway?”
AS IT HAPPENED, Jennie Lyn had disappeared from the truck where I’d left her, and the only sign she’d been there was a wadded-up paper napkin soaked in her blood. She could have been anywhere in the Heights by now. And Nolan had evidently connected with his friends on their way out and found a ride, leaving me and John Kozklowski to limp away in the township truck. I got behind the wheel and we began the long process of leaving the Heights.
After a period of silence, John said, “You going to arrest me? Charge me?”
“I would have if Mike had wanted it. You dumb shit.”
There was another silence. John said, “My truck’s probably at the bar.”
“I don’t care where your truck is. I’m going to the station. You can get home from there however you want.”
We encountered the two state troopers assigned to the area; they had rendezvoused at the initial checkpoint and looked a bit befuddled. I leaned out the window to talk to them. The smile on my face did not come easily.
French asked me, “You hear any shots fired? We couldn’t find the place.”
“I checked; it wasn’t anything. A celebration.” I turned to the other trooper. “You ever catch up with those four-wheelers?”
“That was you up in the clearing?”
“Yessir. Henry Farrell. Sad to say, I let mine get away.”
“No way we’re catching them up here.”
“Suppose not. Good night.”
French gave John Kozlowski a funny look, but let us go.
John and I drifted over country roads and eventually fetched up at the garage. The reporters had given up on me and gone home. I kept the truck idling and John slid under the wheel. I said, “I saw Nolan out there. You going to tell me who the others were?”
Before closing the door and pulling away, he said, “Sorry, Farrell. You can probably guess, so I don’t really need to say, do I? Couldn’t believe my luck when you showed up.”
It comforted me to be back at the station, and before I knew it I’d taken off my boots and socks. I found a plastic bag and dropped JL’s pistol and knife in it, labeling it with her initials and the date, and stowing it in the gun locker. There was a phone message from the sheriff asking me to check in the next morning, and letting me know that one of the roustabouts on a well pad near Midhollow had not made it home to Texas for Christmas, and neither the company that employed him nor his family had had any word since. The tremor of excitement in his voice was unmistakable.
In the process of putting my shoes back on, I slipped into a dream of an upside-down tree in a river; the dream alarmed me, and I decided to just put my head on the desk for several hours. I woke up at three, got in my truck, and headed for home and bed.
I MET MY wife Polly some thirteen years ago, hiking in the Wind River Range. After my tour in Somalia was up and I got discharged, I was wandering America with some notion of becoming a mountain man. I’d heard that when they gathered, they gathered in Pinedale, Wyoming. Do-you-know-how-to-skin-griz, pilgrim?, Wyoming. With bear spray and a backpack with my fiddle strapped to the side, I was making for a place deep in the mountains called Scab Creek. I chose the destination in hopes that its name might discourage casual tourists and campers. In my mind, at that time, I was a serious frontier man.
I was two days into my journey, having camped the night before by a small hilltop pond that looked inviting, but was alive with giardia from the cattle that were allowed to graze there part of the year. I’d made it up into the real high country, where the air was cooler and much thinner, the light much more white. I hoped to outrun both cow shit and people. One thing I wanted very much was a freezing-cold mountain lake all to myself, but I knew to be careful. I’d had parasites in Africa, inside and out, and I can tell you it’s nobody’s picnic. A bear or two, I felt, I could handle. Well, I never did see a grizzly but one that trip, prancing in a tributary of the Wind River far below me.
I had been following knife-edge ridges for some time, and had descended into a lodgepole forest so that I could ascend once more into the cold solitary air on the next peak. The climb was tough, over roots and stones, and my head was pulsing from the altitude, which may be why I didn’t hear Polly’s bodhran until I was on the edge of a golden field where she stood, thumping away at the drum in 6/8 time.
I was transfixed by a vision. Her brown hair was back in a bun and she was short and sturdy, all muscle between shorts and hiking boots. I don’t know, you might have seen her out there and thought she was nothing special. And you can tell me it’s no great surprise to find a would-be folk musician on a trail in the Winds. To the young easterner I was at the time, Polly was—forgive me—a handwritten note from God, inviting me into the open air of grace.
She hadn’t noticed me. Stowing my pack off the trail, I produced my fiddle and tuned it quietly. I’m mostly an American fiddler and those tunes are in 4/4 time, but I was able to retrieve a passable “Banish Misfortune” from some corner of my brain, to match her Irish 6/8. The field was bigger than it looked, and there was one boulder between me and Polly, behind which I paused to reconsider. In the end I emerged, keeping a distance of about twenty-five feet. I felt awkward, out of character, but I had committed to the mission. It didn’t take long for her to hear me, just a few years off my life.
Her arm slowed. She cocked her head at the sound of my playing, and stopped drumming entirely. When she turned, eyes wide, I nodded encouragingly at the bodhran hanging in her hand. And then she burst out laughing. She had the brightest, prettiest smile. I hammed it up for a moment, clogging foolishly until I came to a suitable stopping point, then I bowed and said I hoped she would have a nice day, and turned to go.
Of course I found out later that I was nowhere near as far into the Winds as I had thought. I mean, I was pretty far, but not enough to outrun the friendliness that governs the trails up there. Polly had known exactly how far she was; enough that she could hope to practice her new instrument without observation, but not enough that she was completely shocked at another’s presence.
Before long I was perched on a boulder by her tiny tent, eating from a gallon bag of antelope jerky, playing bits of tunes, and talking. Polly was from a small town in Colorado, originally, and lived in Jackson, Wyoming, at that time. She was an outdoors bum of sorts, and worked in an art gallery and gift shop that catered to vacationers and sold lamps made out of elk antlers, and furniture assembled from shellacked, rough-hewn trees. While I was in the 10th Mountain Division, she was in and out of college in Boulder. My trip to Somalia did come up, but there honestly wasn’t that much to say about it. I had missed the fight in Mog. We did our best not to get shot, and to make sure people got fed. It was a blighted place—everythi
ng stripped, everything burned out and destroyed. We steered the conversation in more amiable directions, the usual stuff people in their early twenties probably talk about. We’d both read Gary Snyder.
Polly was easy to be around and some of the time we didn’t feel the need to talk at all. Here we were in a spectacular place, a place new to me, and I felt new myself. She had never known me as bashful, or boring, or poor or unworthy. I had just returned from a place of despair and starvation, and was ready to be free and have my fill of everything light and good—it was hard to imagine leaving her giant smile or the tiny gold stud that glinted on the left side of her nose.
I don’t think she got tired of me, but she did seem glad when someone else she knew from Jackson approached us from farther down the trail. A tall, skinny guy named Will with circular glasses and a mop of hair under a purple bandanna. He seemed nice. I was immediately jealous, and told myself get used to it, Henry, because you’re going to be alone for the rest of your life. It got worse when Will took out one of those backpacker guitars that never stays in tune, and wanted to play. But I could see the idea made Polly happy, so we thumped through a few 1-4-5 folk songs before I packed it up, claiming a need to reach a particular distance before setting up my camp.
“Okay,” Polly said slowly, “maybe we’ll see you on the way out.” She made no attempt to stop me other than—she’d later inform me—a look, a “smoldering” look. I caught it but didn’t, you know?
In a way I was glad because, had I lingered into the evening, she’d inevitably have worried for her safety with a stranger, a veteran and a vagabond. That was the romantic way I saw myself. Best to leave her with earnest, kindly Will and press on. As I hiked out of that field, my heart was bursting so far out of proportion that I had to laugh to keep from crying. I walked it off, or so I thought. Hours later I collapsed on a windswept summit above a cold mountain lake with just enough light left to put up my tent. Some perverse impulse made me stay in that spot a day longer than I had planned without enough food, just so it would be even less likely I’d see her again on my way out. I was surrounded by vast beauty and the smell of my own chickenshit.