by Tom Bouman
I shook my head to clear it.
Getting from my truck to his relatives’ front door, Aub wanted none of me, and neither did Carly, who thanked me perfunctorily, but fumed when I suggested that a man who isn’t locked up in a basement has less of a reason to escape. “We’re putting this behind us,” she said. “First step is getting him tested in Scranton. Doing it tomorrow. You can rest easy, Officer, Aub won’t be in our care for long.” The door shut, not exactly in my face, but nearly, and I was content knowing that at least Aub didn’t die in a ditch. Though I wished he’d been able to tell me more. We’d have to dig. I idled in the driveway long enough to leave a message with the sheriff’s department.
I pulled away and drove into the gathering night. Yes, I wished I’d been able to get an answer. Then again, I know what it’s like to lose a person you love, and I don’t often want to talk about it either. Almost as bad is when you lose a place you love, which I expect was much on Aub’s mind. I knew about that too.
SO. BEFORE I got hired to police Wild Thyme Township, Pennsylvania, I served Big Piney, Wyoming. Small town, Big Piney. Pinedale was the biggest nearby town, a town I’d grown to love for its associations of romance and freedom, and just everything. Much like Wild Thyme, nothing too much happened out in Big Piney. Domestics, burglaries, and drugs.
Polly and I had bought a little house on the outskirts. It was a one-story cabin-style home you often see out West, newish and not beautiful, but meant to sit in the landscape as though it had always been there. We couldn’t afford much in the way of land, but open space meant a lot to both of us. The place we found had five acres of grass and sage, a stand of aspen, and part of an irrigation ditch, complete with a winch-operated gate and water rights. The house was on a wide rolling plain with just a few other homes in view. We could afford it if we both worked, and the first time the wind came over the grass, well. We thought we’d hit the jackpot. Best of all, it had a partial view of the Winds, the kind of view you could fit in your scope: neat, chiseled gray. Perfect. We bought it.
Never mind that over the rise where we couldn’t see was a natural gas wellhead. The drilling had long been completed and the frack pool filled in, but there remained a white storage tank like a wedding cake as big as Jesus, and a compressor station that sounded as bad as an airport some nights. It was what we could afford and, we reasoned, someone had built there and lived there, so we could too.
Poll and I would often hike in the Winds. She loved those mountains. Me, I liked when you reached the summit with a view spread out, and you couldn’t help feeling something pulling you farther in, to the next peak and the next. I sought that the way I enjoyed working up an appetite before a big dinner. What Polly liked was the in-between, driving or walking in the foothills where you felt cradled in the folds of land with sage and lodgepoles and aspen, all that green and washed-out red and yellow rising into the sky. She often said the in-betweens didn’t get enough credit compared with the peaks. It was on such a hike that Poll collapsed sideways against a fallen tree, her face gray, her lungs heaving but never seeming to pull enough in, and we noticed she had a problem.
This was around the time that the Mexican cartels were beginning their push east, taking over the methamphetamine business in rural areas. Yeah, Mexican cartels. They’re out there, and they’re not the kind to leave revenue streams untapped. And they’re still coming east, by the way, so Holebrook County get ready. Back then, in Big Piney, I was pulled into a coordinated effort with the DEA and attached to the Sublette County Sheriff’s Department. But I came to find out that it was just to do the usual shit that they no longer had time for—patrolling, speed traps, issuing summonses, and the like—now that they were part of this task force. I remember it as a frustrating time: too many hours, too many night shifts, boring work, but enough money to keep ahead of the mortgage.
Poll and I began to argue about the place. In the daylight hours, when she spent the most time out-of-doors, she would complain of splitting headaches. In bed she’d dry-cough all night, cursing the compression station. I’d urge her to go to the clinic, which she did many times, with no answers or positive results. Once, she got lesions from her hands all up her arms—open sores the size of nickels that overstayed their welcome by a week and then disappeared as mysteriously as they’d come on. I suggested it might have been an allergic reaction to something she’d touched in the wild, poison oak maybe.
You see, I felt loyal to the cabin; we’d made a commitment to it and it felt like the home I’d dreamt of since back when I was sweating my balls off in the 10th. And while I was unsettled by my wife’s ailments, to me, that’s all they were, a series of separate symptoms with no pattern. Secretly, I’d wish she would handle them a little more stoically. The doctors were turning up nothing, and the temptation was, in my most secret thoughts, to feel Poll was being overdramatic. Because she was unhappy about me, or something else. This is hard to talk about.
NIGHT HAD FALLEN, drawing me into the Heights. There were long threads to tug on up there, and some of them were bound to lead to George. Tracy Dufaigh’s disappearance made me uneasy, and Jennie Lyn’s suggestion of a killer close to George had me wondering. I meant to find them, one or both. The gauntlet of staties guarding Old Account Road had long since been sent home, and I jounced my way into the ink-black forest with no interference.
Number 1585 Upper Sloat was tucked back from the road in a little depression in the thick of the woods. The lawn was neatly landscaped, almost finicky, with a long line of carefully placed stones marking the border of the forest and a small statue of the Virgin Mary looking over a decorative pool. On one side of the house was a prefab shed and a garden patch enclosed by chicken wire. How anyone managed to grow anything in the shadow of those trees was a mystery. Nothing about the tidy little home suggested the presence of a party girl like Tracy. There were a couple lights burning on the first and second floors. I stepped up to the front door. Hung on the frame was a knocker in the shape of a woodpecker perched on a tree trunk; you pulled a leather cord and its beak knocked on the piece of wood. I tried it but got no answer. I rapped on the storm door and a dog bellowed once, and was silenced.
It was not Tracy Dufaigh who answered, but a large man with white hair. He wore an undershirt that showed off faded tattoos on both arms. One of them looked like the insignia to a fire company. His index finger was tucked in the middle of a paperback novel. He tilted his head back and peered at me through half-glasses on the end of his nose.
“Evening,” I said. “Looks like I may have the wrong house. My name’s Henry Farrell. Looking for Tracy Dufaigh.”
“Good luck with that. Francis Dufaigh,” he said, indicating himself. “Tracy’s father.”
“Pleased to meet you, Francis. And sorry about the hour—”
“What’s she done?” He spoke softly, with a hint of something fierce.
“Nothing,” I said. “I just have some news. I’d like to check in.”
“She’s not at home.”
“Any idea where she might be?”
“Listen, my wife’s already in bed.”
“I’m sorry about the hour. I’d love some help reaching her. If you have any idea—”
“You said she’s not in trouble?”
I shook my head no and opened my hands.
The man sighed and I caught coffee breath. He checked behind him, in the direction of the staircase. “Come on in.” He led me through a living room decorated with framed needlepoint sentiments and hook rugs in brown and orange. The stereo’s dial glowed green and a country record spun on the turntable, its volume low, the Nashville Strings weeping. We passed into a small kitchen where a dishwasher rumbled, and a mastiff lolled on a plaid dog bed, its head on its front paws. The kitchen smelled like dog. Francis pulled out a chair for me at the table and took the one opposite.
I opened my mouth but Francis stopped me with an admonishing finger. His voice was quiet, almost a whisper. “My wife,” he said. “Upsta
irs. Can we keep it down? She doesn’t want to hear it.”
I nodded. “Tracy’s not in any trouble,” I repeated.
“Listen, she showed up a few weeks back to collect her boots and clothes, a couple other things. She’s gone.”
“Any idea where to?”
“I’m telling you I don’t know. Ain’t seen her. Don’t know if she’s alive or dead.”
“She was alive and well as of yesterday.”
“Oh? How’d she seem?”
“Fine.”
“Fine. You know more than I do.”
“Look, Francis, with respect, I wonder why you asked me in, if you have nothing more to say than that. Whatever it is—”
A flash of exasperation crossed Francis’s face. “‘She’s not in trouble.’ Sure. What do you know? She’s out with these hillbillies, taking crystal and . . . carrying on. Her mother and I tried. Whatever’s keeping her out is stronger than we are. She’s been a grown woman for some time, but she ain’t a grown-up yet. And you. What do we pay taxes for, the kind of hogshit going on up here?”
I ignored that. “Any particular friends that you know of?”
“Yeah,” he said heavily. “Fellow named Pat McBride is the latest. You know of him? In your professional life, maybe?”
“Yeah.” McBride was the guy we had a warrant out on, whose lab had been in the way of the SERT team and the sheriff. The connection was unexpected. “Somewhere out on Westmeath Road, right?”
Francis looked at his broad, lumpy hands on the table. He showed them to me. “In another life,” he said, closing his hands into fists. “Hey. Maybe the last thing I’ll ever do in this one . . .”
“Let’s not get carried away,” I said, knowing I couldn’t rush off at that moment, but feeling a terrible urge to get moving. I looked at the aging man across from me. “It’s not for me to say, but . . . I don’t know, Francis, it seems like Tracy had a good upbringing.”
He nodded. “Yeah. Well, it wasn’t always the palace you see here. And I, I spent some time away from the family. When Tracy was growing up. Several years.”
“Everyone can have a new life,” I said, even as I made a note to look up Francis Dufaigh’s record. Everyone has something they don’t tell, and his sounded like a big one. “Everyone has the right to start over.”
“I hope that’s true. For her, I mean.”
I hoped so too. But I said it more to be kind than because I believed it. We stood and Dufaigh showed me out; I bade him good night at his front step. He closed the screen door gently and disappeared back into his home, just as an older woman in a nightgown appeared on the stairs inside.
I stopped above the power-line cut where I’d been the night before, and picked my way down to the spot where Jennie Lyn Stiobhard’s upturned ATV would have been. It was gone.
I drove to Westmeath Road. The sheriff had described McBride’s trailer as “derelict.” I wondered if there was a special word for a trailer that a fallen oak tree has crumpled at the midsection, because that’s exactly what had happened to this one. Standing in the yard, with the bare treetop reaching out to me like a drunk lying in the gutter, I tried to imagine what kind of life made this place a home. I walked all the way around the clearing, through some swampy woods full of beer cans, garbage bags, and junk too bulky to fit into garbage bags. There was newly charred wood in the fire pit out back. The smell of it was not enough to mask the cat-piss odor of a lab.
When I stepped under the yellow police tape and got next to the single-wide, I found that the tree formed a natural border between what had been the meth lab—until SERT and Dally had busted and collected it—and a tiny crash pad. McBride had duct-taped blue tarps over the wound in the structure, effectively sealing one side from the other. On the back end of the trailer a garden hose snaked from a kitchen window to one on the lab side.
I yanked open a door that barely fit in its misshapen frame. Flipping on a light switch, I found that the electricity was still hooked up. The living side of the trailer was about what I expected. Its denizens had not been big recyclers, and empty tallboys of cheap light and ice beer littered the kitchen, along with dead soldiers of schnapps. There was a couch heaped with stained sleeping bags. In the bathroom, orange mold crept up the shower walls and stained the sink. At the far end was the bedroom; the bed had been removed, presumably to make room for more people to crash out. Blankets were heaped along the walls and the room smelled strongly of cigarettes. I opened the door to a built-out closet. In a set of coveralls hanging from a hook on the door, a lifelike rubber dildo protruded from the fly—probably a nasty little jolt for the SERT team who first searched the place. Atop a pile of dirty men’s laundry, I found a woman’s bag with toiletries and clothing inside. The clothing was on the larger end, about Tracy’s size. There were several pairs of women’s boots and shoes on the floor. I remembered Tracy Dufaigh tending to horses in her canvas sneakers. In a paper sack, there were several pornographic DVDs and a glass marijuana pipe.
If Tracy had wanted, she could have returned for her things almost anytime. We didn’t have the manpower to watch the place day and night. She hadn’t, and I figured McBride had holed up somewhere and taken her along. Nobody was home, and nobody would return while I was around.
My car passed cobbled-together homesteads. Dogs leapt from their houses and bounced short at the ends of their chains. Groups of people on porches and in yards paused their conversations to follow my progress, cigarette tips glowing. As I rolled by a larger gathering of men in full camo, a crushed can pinged off the side of my truck.
Westmeath Road was sparsely populated. I passed a burned-out farmhouse whose one remaining barn had gone so far diagonal it looked like a dog on point. Around the bend I could see where I was going, in the glow of a bonfire reflected against silver trees. I pulled to the side of the road and turned off my headlights. Some dangerous people were up ahead, folks I called the People of the Bus. In daylight, the turquoise school bus looked like a relic of some 1960s adventure. Why else, you might ask, would anyone have painted it that strange color, if not to roam the country in psychedelic regalia? In fact, the bus was at one point the hunter-green of Midhollow High School, had been bought for a song, and simply faded where it stood, disused among more conventional automobiles, also long abandoned. A metal chimney protruded from the roof, leading down to an old woodstove. In what might be termed the front yard, an iron hand pump marked the location of a water well.
I don’t know exactly who first made a domicile of the place, presumably a son or nephew of the absent landowner. Over the years someone or perhaps several different people had taken out the seats and installed bunks, hanging old sheets over the windows. I’d seen Jennie Lyn, or her car, a number of times when I passed by in my own pickup—not the township police truck—on my own time. A lot of observation I do has to be that way. I rolled down my window and listened. Men’s voices clamored over each other, rough-sounding and half frantic. I couldn’t make out any words. I sat and took deep breaths.
With methamphetamine you can’t assume that any of the usual rules are in place. Everyone knows it destroys the people who take it, but it also has destroyed plenty who don’t. It’s not a peaceable drug. Best not to go startling it, I reasoned, especially so outnumbered. I rolled up my window, flipped on my headlights, and began a slow roll around the bend.
They’d stoked the bonfire to about six feet high, and the flame danced off the glass in the windows of the bus and what was left of the other cars, made cavern walls of the surrounding trees, against which the shadows of the men in the yard were black cave paintings that came alive. The shadows went still as my vehicle came into view. Nobody ran. Some remained standing where they were, and two or three lounged in bus seats around the fire. At the edges of the clearing, a thicket of spirea and crabapple separated open space from forest; it had grown in and around a fleet of dead cars and appliances. A few ATVs and rusted pickups looked to be the only working vehicles there. One of the truc
ks had its doors open and was blasting metal from maxed-out speakers. I unzipped my jacket and stepped out of the truck.
Standing too quickly caused blood to race from my head. As my vision corkscrewed shut, I focused on the one thing that remained, the bonfire, flickering alone in the black. Something approached, loud and primordial, in a different register from the violent music. Unseeing, I tucked the open jacket back to expose not only the .40 on my hip, but the one holstered under my arm.
My vision cleared enough to reveal one of the men moving in my direction. He didn’t stop until his face was about six inches from mine. It was a face lined and hollowed, old before its time but still patched with a young man’s beard. His eyes vibrated in place. It was Kyle Leahey, my old friend from the county drunk tank. I swallowed the affront of his closeness and aggression, and stepped to the side. He stepped with me. I was thinking about where and how to hit him when a man called out from the fireside.
“You’re a little far afield, ain’t you, Officer?” As Kyle turned his head at the voice behind him, I stepped past and approached the fire. He snorted in anger and I heard him coming up behind me. I flipped open my holster, but with a glance and a sharp whistle, the man lounging by the bonfire kept Kyle at bay. “Have a seat,” he told me. I remained standing, and followed my would-be attacker across the yard with a look.
“Making my rounds,” I said. I picked out two women among the men, one skinny with a grown-out dye job, the other plump and blond, neither of them Jennie Lyn nor Tracy. Everyone seemed to defer to the man I was talking to, so I kept my attention on him. “You having a good time tonight?”