Back in the truck, they drove slowly along the track until the forest gave way to a large square of open meadow, full of garden lupins and mint the colour of lavender, and dotted by the occasional conifer – Scotch pine, Jack pine, and Douglas Fir, remnants that had escaped the saw when these acres, years before Henry bought them, held several thousand Christmas trees. ‘This track circles back to the road,’ said Michael. ‘Keep your eyes peeled – there should be a spur that goes to the rear of the property.’
And at the back edge of the meadow they could just make out the signs of an even smaller track that went through ferns and more wild mint into higher grass and brush. ‘If we can get through that,’ said Michael, pointing to a mixed stand of tag alder and birch saplings, ‘we’ll be near the crick. There’s a place to park there.’
‘You built a parking space back here?’
Michael laughed. ‘No, it’s just some flat land where we used to leave the car.’
They bumped and scraped their way through the under-growth, scratching the sides of the truck, once hitting a tree stump so hard on their underside that they both sniffed for a telltale smell of gas from a ruptured fuel tank. Nothing, only the faint, sour odour of stinking chamomile. Just as Michael began to fear they were lost, hopelessly enmeshed in woods, they found themselves in a small circle of low grass, stunted by the lack of sunlight. There was just enough room to turn round.
They got out and stood, listening. ‘What’s that tinkling noise?’ asked Donny.
‘Come see.’ They walked to the end of the clearing, then over a curved and gentle ridge of soft earth, covered with soft needles from a fully-grown Balsam pine. Michael pointed to the far side of the ridge, where a creek not much more than a yard wide bubbled noisily. It was only inches deep and on its sandy bottom the current had traced whorls and miniature ravines no thicker than a baby’s finger. The sand was bronze with streaks of cerise; it glowed like petrified wood.
‘Water’s high, believe it or not,’ said Michael, remembering how he and Cassie used to make love on a blanket not fifteen feet from where he now stood. They’d bring sandwiches, then lean down on their knees and drink straight from the tiny creek. ‘Usually by this time in summer it’s almost dried up.’
‘Where’s it go?’
‘Into the Still, I think. At least that’s what Pop always claimed. But then he said there were fish in it, too. I never saw any. He made up a story about a big brown trout he called George. There was a log down there a ways which formed a little pool. He claimed George slept there at night. I must have been twelve years old before I didn’t believe him any more.’
He followed the rivulet downstream, with Donny trailing. Soon they were in woods so viscous-thick with leaves that they couldn’t even see the truck, less than a hundred feet away. Amazingly, he found the miniature log jam still there, clogging up the creek; the pool that formed in front of it was almost three feet deep. Michael stood staring at the darker, deeper water here, his head full of memories: of Cassie and the soft cooing noise she made when they made love; of the time they’d been experimenting with Cassie on top, and she’d suddenly screamed – out of excitement he’d thought at first, but actually because a garter snake was trying to join them on the blanket.
There were childhood memories too: of chasing Gary through these very woods in some elaborate game of tag; of his mother on the bank by the creek, unpacking sandwiches, the sound of ice cubes clunking out of a thermos’s mirror-bright insides; of his mother’s post-lunch walks through the meadow and her eventual return with a bouquet of wild flowers – thyme and purple Meadow-rue and wood nymphs from the swale by the crick, all wrapped with a veil of Queen Anne’s Lace.
Suddenly Donny’s voice cut in, hushed and urgent. ‘Look at that.’
Lifting his head, Michael expected to see a deer, or partridge, something worth keeping quiet for. There was nothing. Then looking past Donny’s outstretched hand he saw, behind the trunk of an enormous maple, a small, olive-coloured pup tent. Its canvas roof was sagging badly.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ whispered Donny.
‘Why? I want to know who this is. He’s trespassing on my land. Or Gary’s land anyway.’
And he stepped quickly over the crick and began walking quietly towards the tent. Donny followed behind, whispering more than once, ‘I wish I had my gun.’
As they approached the tent they could see the blackened stumps of a small camp fire. The tent’s entrance faced away from them, and as Michael began to circle around he stubbed his toe on a rock and stumbled, almost falling down.
Some Indian I’d make, he thought, just as a shout suddenly came from out of the tent. ‘Who’s there?’ It was a strained voice, panicky and thin.
‘Come out with your hands up,’ Michael shouted back. Donny looked at him as if he’d gone crazy. Then a figure crawled slowly out of the front of the tent, trying to hold its hands in the air.
Michael said more softly, ‘It’s all right, Gary. There’s nobody here but us chickens.’
4
GARY MUST NOT have graduated with honours from Survival Training #1 or #2, for by the time Michael had found him he hadn’t eaten in forty-eight hours. Now he sat looking drained and exhausted while Michael put two pork chops under the broiler, French fries in the oven, and a square block of frozen peas into a saucepan of boiling water.
Gary had hidden his car deep in brush in a far corner of the Half. Not willing to chance another effort to run away, Michael had driven it and Gary back to the house while Donny drove in his own truck and tactfully went home. The brothers had barely spoken in the car, and when Gary started to explain, Michael had told him to wait until they were home. But now, once started, Gary barely drew breath, so relieved did he seem to spill the beans. He seemed tormented, something Michael couldn’t understand until Gary had told most of his story.
There had been exercises in Mason County, held in the national forest not far from Dr Fell’s hunting lodge, about two miles from the Pere Marquette river. Hostage-freeing, counter-terrorism – various simulated manoeuvres to prepare for all the potential crises that the participants presumably agreed would one day threaten this part of the Wolverine state.
Then, as if automatic weapons fire were not exciting enough, someone had the bright idea of enlivening things with explosive. One highly illegal hand grenade was produced – a souvenir from the Vietnam era – and used on the edge of a swamp, but to what was unanimously felt to be disappointing effect. So two weeks later, when Raleigh Somerset revealed to a core elite of trusted Marine members a cache of ten sticks of dynamite, a couple of micro-detonators, and six hundred feet of slow-burning fuse, the excitement was hard to contain.
On the appointed day in April, when six large tree stumps from a once-harvested part of the forest were targeted for destruction, the weather turned nasty: freezing rain fell in high, harsh winds throughout the day. To Raleigh’s fury only three of his nine ‘inner circle’ cadre showed up, including Gary and Bubba. Unwilling to proceed with such a small participatory audience, Raleigh had conducted an indoor seminar on small arms instead, then asked Gary to stay behind when the others went home.
Raleigh said he had a small request, though it struck Gary that his casual manner of asking was belied by the pains he’d taken to make sure they were alone. Would Gary store the dynamite for him until the following month, when the day’s aborted exercise would finally take place?
Flattered at first, Gary happily agreed, but soon found himself wondering what to do with the small wooden crate Raleigh entrusted him with. He couldn’t very well store it in his rented bungalow, since he had a wide-ranging circle of hard-partying friends and acquaintances who were in and out of his place, sometimes even when Gary wasn’t there. Not to mention the vague but even more disturbing concern that he might somehow – by dropping the stuff, by storing it in the wrong conditions (too hot, too dry, too something) – blow himself to smithereens. He ruled out his father’s house on the same
grounds. That was big of you, thought Michael.
This left the Half. Ten and a half acres of mixed woods and meadow gave plenty of hiding space; the only visitors other than Henry Wolf and Gary were occasional hunters who ignored the No Trespassing signs in search of their buck. But hunting was out of season, and there was no reason to think the dynamite wouldn’t be safely gone by June, much less by the opening day of deer season in October.
At this point Michael interrupted. ‘Why did Raleigh ask you to keep the dynamite for him?’
‘He told me he couldn’t store the stuff at his place because he was being watched.’
‘Do you think he was?’
‘Maybe. He left Wayne County in a hurry last year, and who knows what trouble he got into down there. Though Raleigh is paranoid at the best of times.’
At first, Gary couldn’t decide where to hide the dynamite on the Half. There were no buildings on the land, and he didn’t dare leave it in the brush, however well covered. Equally, he didn’t want to bury it – inevitably there’d be traces of his excavating. He ended up (Michael could tell Gary still thought it a clever solution) by wrapping the crate in waterproof plastic and hauling it halfway up one of the overgrown Douglas Firs, where it sat concealed in a bunch of evergreen branches from all eyes except those already in the know. And Gary was the only one in the know.
All would have been well, had there not occurred one of those freak coincidences in which Gary, describing it, clearly saw the hand of a harsh and punitive Fate.
Adlard Ferguson ran one of the few independent timber businesses left in the state of Michigan, and specialized in the selective harvesting of land the big boys – Weyerhaeuser in particular – did not find worthwhile cutting. He was assiduous if not particularly prosperous, and it was in the normal course of business that he wrote Henry Wolf, as he had written him every year, to ask if, as the owner of a small land parcel in the east end of Atlantic County, Wolf would consider allowing Ferguson’s team to cut down no more than one hundred trees on his property, such trees to be selected ahead of time and chosen only with Wolf’s approval. In return, Ferguson would pay Henry a one-off fee of $1500 and a ten per cent royalty on his own gross revenues from board length sold post-sawmill.
Every year before Wolf had replied with a polite no, but now, whether out of interest in the money on offer or just out of some arbitrary curiosity, Henry considered the offer, and even, most uncharacteristically, drove out to the Half to look at what he might be willing to allow Ferguson to cull.
And it was during his survey of the timber on his land, (which naturally focused on the taller, more lucrative specimens) that Henry discovered, obscured by branches, a wooden crate sitting halfway up a Douglas Fir, attached to a rope that ended in a neat loop on a branch a dozen feet above the ground. Curiosity piqued, Henry then managed, by standing on top of his automobile, to reach and untie the rope, then lower the crate onto the roof of his car. Unwrapping its plastic cover, he pried open the crate’s lid with a screwdriver from the car’s toolset and found himself looking at what were indisputably ten sticks of dynamite.
Here Gary stopped his account for a moment, as if in awe at the freak chance leading to his father’s discovery. ‘I never thought he could get that angry,’ he said, looking slightly sick at the memory. He added that in the face of Henry’s explosion he had not even tried to lie, coming clean with the whole truth at once.
‘So what did Pop do?’
‘He’d left the dynamite at the Half, in the brush by the clearing.’
‘Yes, but what did he do?’
Gary wouldn’t look at Michael. ‘He went to see Raleigh.’
Raleigh hadn’t been home, but Mrs Somerset, the former sweet girl called Louise Grade, had gone to Stillriver High School. So she told Henry happily enough that Raleigh was in Weir township, addressing Marine members on the pressing topic of counterinsurgency. Michael’s father must have been in a near-frenzy of anger, because he wasn’t willing to wait to see Raleigh, but drove straight to Weir to find him.
Since Michael had never understood why his father had attended Marine meetings, this explained a lot.
Once at the meeting in Weir, his father had doubtless listened impatiently to Raleigh’s codswallop declamations, then confronted him. Gary reported that his father had called Raleigh stupid, and Michael could almost hear the specific locutions: You were always a horse’s ass when I taught you, Somerset, so I’m not surprised to see the saddle still fits. Something along those lines.
‘Why didn’t you go with him?’ Michael asked Gary.
‘He didn’t tell me he was going. The first I knew about it was Raleigh asking me how I could be so dumb as to let my father know about the dynamite.’ He paused momentarily. ‘Then I took the crate back to Raleigh’s house.’
‘Was that the dynamite the police found?’
Gary nodded. He still wouldn’t look Michael in the eye. ‘Four days later. That’s when Maguire arrested Raleigh.’
And then Michael understood. ‘Quite a coincidence. What did Raleigh make of that?’ Gary didn’t say anything. ‘Raleigh must have thought Pop had turned him in. Didn’t he?’
His brother nodded slowly. Michael kept talking. ‘Is that why you became an enemy of Raleigh? Harold told me Raleigh had a ruckus with Bubba, but it was you Raleigh was after, wasn’t it? Bubba was trying to help you, wasn’t he?’
Gary said, ‘Since you seem to know it all, why ask me?’
‘Well, Pop’s not going to explain anything any more, now is he? And if I understand all this, Raleigh thought Pop turned him in, which gives Raleigh a motive to kill Pop. Doesn’t it?’
Gary looked out the window. ‘Pop didn’t turn Raleigh in. Not that he wasn’t tempted, but he told me he wouldn’t because he thought I might get arrested, too.’
‘How do you know he didn’t change his mind?’
‘I tell you, I know. Pop didn’t tell Maguire anything – he never even met Maguire.’
‘How can you be so certain?’ He sensed this was worth pressing.
‘Easy. I know Pop didn’t turn Raleigh in because I did.’ And then Gary’s mouth wobbled and he burst into tears.
Michael comforted his brother as best he could, but his thoughts were racing as first he put an arm around Gary, then got him some paper towel on which to blow his nose.
Eventually Gary stopped sniffling and said, ‘We had a softball game last summer, out at the snowmobiles resort.’
Michael said, ‘So?’ more patiently than he felt.
‘I took the baseball bat with me, and I used it in the game. I don’t know if anyone else did.’
‘That explains your prints on it. You might have told me that, you know.’
‘You don’t understand. The bat disappeared. I couldn’t find it when I went home that night. I didn’t think much about it – it was just a baseball bat – and then it shows up again.’
Michael went and put some ice cubes in a glass, then poured himself two inches of bourbon. He took a large slug of it as Gary said, ‘He’s trying to set me up.’
‘Who? Raleigh?’
‘Who else? He killed Pop because he thinks Pop told the cops about the dynamite. I thought he’d kill me, too, but in a way it’s worse than that – he’s trying to hang me for Pop’s murder instead.’ He looked close to tears again. ‘I guess it’s no more than I deserve. I might as well have killed Pop myself.’
‘Listen,’ said Michael sharply, ‘you’ve said that now. I don’t want to hear you say it again. Not to me, or anybody, and especially not to yourself. Otherwise this thing will eat you up inside.’ The corrosive effects of obsession. I’ve been there myself. A complete waste of the soul. ‘You have to let it go.’
Gary took a deep, hyperventilatory breath, then nodded as he stared at his hands.
Michael asked, ‘Was this why you ran away?’
‘Yes,’ he said without hesitation. ‘As soon as you said the bat was back I knew what Raleigh was trying to do.�
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‘But why go to the Half? Why not get out of Dodge altogether? Set out for Detroit, or Chicago? Why not really hide?’
Gary looked thoughtfully at Michael. ‘I don’t know. I just ran. I can’t say I thought it out.’
And it was exactly the calm, confessional tone of his voice and the plausibility of his confusion that made Michael feel his brother was no longer telling him the truth.
‘Listen,’ said Michael again. ‘I think for the time being you’d better stay here. We need to talk to Maguire, but until we do you better not stay at your place. We can go by later and get your things.’
He seemed happy with this and as Michael put his dishes in the sink, Gary said, ‘I need to let Bubba know I’m okay. I’ve got one of his rifles and he may want it back.’
‘Sure,’ said Michael. ‘Anybody else? Barry?’
‘No.’ This was emphatic. Michael thought of Barry coming out of the tavern with the shotgun. No point scaring his brother more than he was scared already, but it was good that he knew Barry was not on his side.
‘Why don’t you go upstairs and lie down for a while?’ Michael suggested. ‘I’ll get you some sheets and a blanket.’
And twenty minutes later, his kid brother was sound asleep while Michael washed his dishes and thought about what Gary had related. Or rather what he hadn’t told him, since running out to the Half didn’t make sense, whatever frazzled state he’d been in. Could Raleigh really have killed his father? Thinking of him at the barbecue – how he angered so readily, the ill-disguised viciousness of Kohls’ party line – Michael had no real trouble seeing Raleigh as a murderer, given the right situation. But would he really risk a life sentence, if not the death penalty, to exact revenge on an old man whose supposed ratting on him didn’t work? And would Raleigh really kill someone so brutally? Why not just use a gun?
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