Dry Bones in the Valley: A Novel

by Tom Bouman

  “Yeah, right.”

  “I’m not kidding, Henry. You need a day off.” I must have still been shaking my head, because she bent down to look me in my whacked-out eyes. “I will bring Ed in and we’ll strap you to a gurney. I’ll call Nicholas. Don’t make me.”

  She took away the wastebasket and came back with a freeze-pack wrapped in cloth and a coffee mug that turned out to be full of water. As I held the ice to my head, she bustled out again and returned with a sheet and several cushions from a couch in the waiting room. She laid them out on the floor. “This is the best I can do for a bed,” she said. “Your friend’s got my other one, but you might need it as bad as he does. Shoes off. Belt off.” She held the sheet open for me and flapped it.

  “Come on,” I said. This was undignified.

  “You need rest and it can’t wait. I’m going to watch you close your eyes.”

  “I thought you weren’t supposed to sleep,” I said. “If you have a concussion.”

  “Are you a doctor? From the look of you, you haven’t slept in at least three days. You’re dehydrated, too. You should smell your breath. Drink the water.”

  Embarrassed, I pulled off my boots and gun belt, stowed the belt and the shoulder holster in a low cabinet where I could reach them easily, untucked my shirt, and lowered myself into the makeshift bed. Liz took a chair by the door. The fabric of the cushions was knobbly where it touched my skin, but my eyelids began to droop and I took off my glasses.

  “How’s it going out there?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure yet,” I said. “We might have broken it open today. Some part of it.” Saying as much aloud got me worked up again, but I let Liz think I was still going down.

  “You being careful?”

  “Always.” I closed my eyes.

  “Any word from George’s family?”

  “Yeah. I’ve got two weeks. They’re going to . . . burn him. Send him down the river.”

  She asked me no more questions, and I let my breathing deepen. When enough time had passed and Liz was convinced I was asleep, I felt her hand smooth the hair from my brow gently. It was motherly, but there was something else in it, something she wouldn’t have done in front of Ed. That gesture set me back a few hours of sleep. As soon as the clinic’s front door clicked and she drove away, I opened my eyes.

  I wasn’t worried about my memory. I was just tired. While I couldn’t exactly recall my phone number—or my address, I tried—I knew I knew how to get home, I could see the roads right there in front of me. As long as I hung on to the things I couldn’t forget, a country boy can survive.

  I don’t know if you’ve ever had squirrel pie. There were times growing up when Father would shake me awake when it was still dark, hand me a round, and say, “Bring back dinner.” And it wouldn’t be any hunting season; we’d just have nothing in the icebox. You just go out and get whatever was in the woods.

  Here’s how you make squirrel pie, and it’s not bad: Once your squirrels are skinned and dressed, you boil them. It can be done over an open fire. In my case, it was atop a woodstove. After Poll died, I returned to Pennsylvania in late summer and early fall, and oftentimes I’d tramp to a field on a nearby farm and forage some feed corn to throw in the pot. Maybe if you find a wild onion bulb to chop in there. I kept boxes of dried peas and instant mashed, or I’d dig up live-forever tubers to mash. You separate the bones from the meat, and spread the mash over the mix of squirrel meat, rehydrated peas, and corn. I’d put it in a little baking pan and hold it in the hot woodstove to crisp up the top. It’s not bad fare. You can substitute rabbit, grouse, any other small game, but a squirrel or two won’t be missed. I’ve had porcupine.

  I guess I don’t eat squirrel much anymore for associations with that time, when I returned to Wild Thyme with no job, no Poll, cleaned out. What it felt like. I had nothing but some gear from the 10th and a .22 rifle with me—I’d sold everything else to pay Poll’s medical bills, and then to afford her service, a small one for her family’s benefit. I’d already scattered her ashes in the Winds, per her wishes. And then I mounted a campaign against the gas operator that had put in the pad over the hill from our cabin. Every day I changed my idea of what I needed to live, in order to pay for a series of tests on the water, the land, trying to convince a lawyer somewhere there was a case. In the end it got too much and I let it, and everything else in the cabin, go. There was something snared and struggling in the back of my mind. I didn’t mind dying, but I’d seen the way Polly went and I didn’t want that. Didn’t know if it wasn’t already too late. I’d outrun it if I could. The old gray dog took two days to run from Idaho Springs to Binghamton; I kept the rifle broken down in my pack and wrapped in a towel.

  Luckily, my parents were holding out for a more favorable housing market at that time, though they had long since moved to North Carolina to be near my sister’s family, so the tiny house on the tiny piece of land where I grew up was still for sale and vacant. My key worked. Everything inside was gone, but I didn’t mind that. In fact, I preferred it that way, at that time.

  I guess people driving by had been seeing lamplight in the window of my parents’ house, and someone wondered aloud to the sheriff who I might be. Maybe a neighbor made the call, maybe it was the realtor who hadn’t shown the place since I’d been there but drove past every week to make sure it wasn’t going to pot. Back then, the township had no police, and the sheriff’s department did the enforcement for that part of the county, along with the state on weekends. That’s when I first met Sheriff Nicholas Dally.

  I’d seen him around in years past, but never face-to-face. He came to my door a little before suppertime, when I was cleaning a piece of game, and before I could greet him, I had to wash my hands off from a jug—the water had been turned off, so I had been lowering a bucket into the well. I admit I was a little ornery in those days. There was nobody in the world I felt I needed to please, including myself, and only one person to answer to, and she was gone. I yanked open the door and stood staring at Dally, saying nothing. He was pleasant enough but I saw a moment of alarm cross his face when he took in my appearance. After a few weeks of the diet I was on you could see my skull beneath my skin, and I was not a little blood-spattered. I gave him my name. He asked for identification, and I stood there staring at him. “Just trying to make sure you are who you say,” he said genially but firmly. “Since your folks aren’t around to keep an eye on things.” I dug through my bag and found my military ID, which was out of date, my Wyoming driver’s license, and my police ID. He thanked me for my service, and asked me was I planning to stick around. I said I didn’t know. “Let me know,” he said, “if you need a ride to the DMV. I’ll send a deputy.”

  He never did send a deputy, because I never asked him to. What life I saw ahead of me didn’t involve driving anywhere. He did contact an old teammate from my high school football days, Ed Brennan. I was a safety and on special teams, and he had been a left guard. We weren’t particularly friendly back in school, coming from different backgrounds. Growing up has a way of smoothing these things out. Ed visited and seemed pleased to see me, and brought a twelve-pack with him, but three beers after being dry for months, with little in my stomach from day to day, and I was weaving in the backyard. I cursed him and his family. He still busts my balls about it, and I’ll have to take his word that it happened because I simply don’t remember it. He was back in a few days, that time bearing a container of spaghetti and meatballs, and a pie made by his wife. I thanked him but found I couldn’t eat more than a bite or two, and had no freezer to save any of it.

  A week of no luck hunting followed, and consequently a week of no luck eating. I remember it in washes. It was euphoric, simple. The moonlight and the wind in the silver leaves began to feel like nourishment to me. Once I spent over twenty-four hours lying in the same spot in the yard, gazing into the sky, willing someone or something to take me away. I could sleep without sleeping, exist without getting stuck in the mire. High times. O
n occasion I’d hear my parents talking in the house, just for a minute, and their conversation would dissolve into nothing because they weren’t there. I kept smelling something like the barracks latrine in Fort Drum in the early morning, or the high school cafeteria when it was newly cleaned and empty. Later I realized it was my body feeding on my muscle, as there was no fat left. In the end, no stag stepped out of the mist to sacrifice himself for me, no spirit animal concerned that I should eat, no. In the end—in the beginning, I should say—Ed stopped by after visiting a construction site he had going in the area, and found me passed out in the backyard with my rifle lying atop me, the muzzle tucked under my chin. Unable to wake me, he laid me out in the back of his pickup with the buckets of tools and scraps of lumber.

  I woke up in a clinic bed with an IV in my arm, which I removed on my own. There was a bowl of chicken soup with rice cooling on a stand next to my bed, and a banana and one piece of buttered toast. As I was getting my second leg back into my trousers, Liz—whom I hadn’t yet met at that time—swept in, saying, “No, no, no, honey. Into the bed with you.” It didn’t take much muscle to get me there. Her firm hands on my shoulders were the first I’d felt in months. I wanted more. “Let me go,” I said.

  “As soon as you eat what’s on this tray. You’re starving, Henry. I can see through you.”

  “I feel better.”

  “Uh-huh. I just got you full of fluids.”

  My head began to clear. “You know my name?” This was wonderful to me.

  “I’m Ed’s wife, who brought you in? Liz Brennan’s my name.” She smiled, and the angels sang.

  “Oh. Thanks for the supper you sent.” I felt bad about not eating it. “It was good.” She stood up straight and I saw her baby bump where it was framed by her white coat. At that time she was pregnant with their second child, it turned out. “You look great,” I said, and burst into tears.

  Anyway, she nursed me back to health and saved my life. Two different, but related, undertakings. She let me be around their family, encouraged our friendship, made me feel as if I had some value to the world. The charity of it wasn’t obvious to me at the time but it is now, looking back, and I just live with it.

  A DISTANT METALLIC rattling woke me. It took me almost a minute to figure out where I was, as the blinds in the examination room were closed and I had been dead asleep. I buckled the .40s on and laced up my boots. There was a patch of hard, salty cloth where my shirt had been trapped between the gun and my side. I walked to the adjacent room, rubbing my face. Behind the door, I heard Yeager make a low panicked sound that rose in pitch and volume. When I entered, he quickly composed his face and relaxed his body, but it was clear from his raw wrists what he’d been trying to do. “Morning,” he said. “I don’t feel very well.”

  “Then you’re in the right place,” I said, unhelpfully. I looked at him in his dirty clothes and his desperation. “What am I going to do with you?”

  I unlocked Vernon and had him take a shower. While he was in there I stripped our beds and dropped the sheets in a neat pile; his soiled jeans and jockeys I tied in a trash bag and stuffed in a can. In Liz’s office there were a few pairs of clean scrubs. I laid a pair of green ones out for him.

  We bought him cigarettes and went to the drive-through doughnut place on the route out of town; Yeager looked at the menu like a begging dog, and I gestured to him to get what he wanted. In a nice way, a not-noticing way. He ordered the largest, sweetest coffee you could get, and four frosted chocolate doughnuts. I almost warned him not to throw up in my car, but held my tongue. I wouldn’t envy anyone in his condition.

  We parked on a ridge overlooking Fitzmorris, with the courthouse’s cupola poking up bright green over bare treetops below us. Beyond, hills rolled south. I thought Yeager might appreciate a look in the direction home. He held down three doughnuts fine, and wrapped the fourth in a napkin and pocketed it.

  “Where you go from here is up to you,” I said.

  “I have nowhere to go.”

  “You have your job.”

  “I doubt that,” he said. The wind whistled over the rise.

  “Can I ask why you ran off, Vernon?” He was silent for a while, thinking and taking sidelong, appraising glances at me. “Before you ask for a lawyer,” I said, “believe me, I’m not about making your life any more difficult. I want to know what you know; that’s all. This is off the record.”

  “You give your word?”

  My word meant nothing legally in that moment, but I gave it, and meant it.

  “I can’t,” he said. “I can’t talk about it. I want to help.”

  “Just start somewhere. What about Contreras?”

  “Shit, Officer—”

  “Henry.”

  “Shit, Henry, that’s . . .”

  “Was it him?” Meaning the photograph he’d seen of John Doe.

  “I said I don’t know.”

  “What’s your relationship to Contreras?”

  “That’s what’s . . . hard to talk about.” He fixed his eyes on the dash and waited for me to catch on.

  “Oh.”

  “‘Oh.’” Yeager rubbed the back of his head and then pulled his hair in a recriminating way. “Gerry and I used to get high. He had a connection to the guy I led you to, McBride. I had a need. Gerry had needs. I love my wife. I love my kid. But they ain’t up here.”

  “I think I understand.”

  “There’s always something around. Whiskey, weed. Some guys can find a cathouse in a one-street town. You look the other way. But some things ain’t allowed. I’d been getting a feeling on the job. Looks, you know. Especially after Gerry ran off, and I was . . . I felt uneasy. Then you two showed up saying he was gone. To me, it . . . I realized it was in the open. Had been, and I couldn’t stand the guys knowing. It wasn’t just about losing my job, which I’m sure I have done by now. I have what you might call a past. One I can’t go back to.”

  I nodded. “Were you Contreras’s only . . . only friend on the job?”

  “Yeah. Far as I know, and I’d know.”

  “You hear from him? See him?”

  “Once, maybe. We—me and a couple guys—went to a bar toward Elmira, late January, I believe. It was a crowded place with a band. I thought I saw him standing toward the back when we walked in. Mostly talking to a fat—an overweight woman. Thought he saw me. Well, I followed him out the back door, and he was gone. Came back in the bar and the woman had a look on her face, like she was—like she knew all about me, but not about me and him. I can’t be sure.” With some encouragement, he remembered the name of the bar.

  “Jesus Christ, Yeager, why didn’t you say any of this when we first talked to you?”

  He looked at me like I was an idiot.

  “We’re talking about lives, here,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Mine. Listen, I did try to call you. Several times. You need a secretary or something. What happened to that deputy of yours, he can’t pick up a phone?”

  “Come again?”

  “Big cranky son of a bitch, red hair, beard?”

  “George Ellis.”

  “Maybe. He stopped us once heading out of McBride’s old place, the trailer with the tree down on it? Took what—what we had, all our cash, Gerry’s gold cross, said it was civil forfeit. Said next time it’d be Gerry’s car and we’d be in county.” He shook his head. “I don’t believe there was anything to that. He was looking for a woman.”

  George had left no record of this stop, or of ever encountering Contreras or Yeager. Dismayed as I was by George’s piracy, my ears pricked up when Yeager mentioned the woman. “Why?” I asked. “Why a woman?”

  “Because he wasn’t half pretending to want to take us in. And because he said so. Asked us who was there, if there was a blond woman there that night, or ever. If we were there to, you know. Visit her.” Yeager’s feet began to tap. “I told him no. Didn’t stop him from haunting the roads along the pipeline, following us on our downtime, you know. Af
ter Gerry left, he seemed to lose interest. Anyway, ain’t seen him lately, your deputy.”

  “He’s . . . no, he isn’t around.” I took a hard look at Yeager.

  We stepped outside so my prisoner could smoke. He put his back to the wind and inhaled one gratefully, then lit another, pulled his coat tight, and took in his surroundings.

  “I have to ask,” I said. “Did you love him? Contreras.”

  “No!”

  “Why I’m asking—”

  “I know why you’re asking. I love my wife. I’d never be jealous of Gerry or any other . . . guy. Just don’t work that way.”

  “Then did you hate him? Feel taken advantage of?”

  “No. It just . . . was, and then it wasn’t.” Yeager rolled his eyes, as if asking himself how it had come to this. When he looked around him, I don’t believe he saw hills and sky; rather, he was looking at a very small room that he’d built for himself, and regretting that there was no door.

  “So,” I said. “So how is it you fetched up on the school bus?”

  “Jesus, the school bus. We went over that last night.”

  “Not how you got there, or why.”

  “I hitchhiked for some, and walked. I’d been out to McBride’s trailer before, you know. With Gerry. Thought I might get a line on him there. Imagine my surprise, it’s all shut down and sealed. So up the road I went, and bam.” He turned his head away and made his tone light. “I don’t remember what-all went on there.”

  “You were ready enough to leave by the time I showed,” I said.

  “Yeah, well. They didn’t treat me very respectfully, I remember that much. I heard them talking about what to do with me: something about a bullet to the head and a trip to the swamp. It could have been a sick joke. I was in the bus. I was afraid to go back out. That’s where I was when I overheard them talking about McBride. McBride and the girl in a camper on January Creek. But you got him, right? So . . .”

  So I owed him one. Thinking about what Yeager had told me, in context, I doubted that the bullet they’d been discussing was intended for him. It sounded like McBride had worn out his welcome on Westmeath Road, or had something they wanted, something that was now in the county’s evidence locker.