by Tom Bouman
“I actually don’t believe that.”
“Maybe I just wanted to see you,” Josh said.
“I’m surprised, that’s all.”
I heard the screen door slap shut, lay my head on the grass, and gazed into the blue sky. I thought about my boots. After five minutes, I crept to the tree line. This time the horses watched me all the way. Safe in the green dark of the woods, I stopped to look at the Bray place once more and imagined for a moment what it’d be like to live there. I felt bad skulking around in the family’s house with all their pictures and things. Please don’t think I didn’t. But if I’m honest, it also felt good. It was something I needed. I told myself it’d be the last time, just like the time before.
I PICKED UP sneakers from home and went back to work, cut out of work at exactly four-thirty, and drove back to the tumbledown farmhouse I rented. I put on my camouflage, including green paint on my shiny sneakers and around my eyes and face where the beard didn’t cover, and headed into the woods. I sat in cover by the edge of a field, trying to coax a gobbler toward a hen decoy. It was the wrong time of day, and I impressed myself by calling one in almost without meaning to. I had a feeling he was the same bird I’d heard two afternoons ago from the opposite hill, and also the huge tom that came to the edge of my yard last evening to taunt me as I ate supper on my porch, wearing only boxer shorts with a hole in the seat. I live in the country, and alone. I’d grabbed the shotgun and stalked him barefoot to the tree line, then stood and watched as he jogged straight down the road ahead of me, too distant for a shot. He’d turned, looked right at me, bobbed his head, and disappeared into the woods.
Now he played it paranoid, hunkering down in a line of maples along a creek. I scraped out another quiet invitation on my call. He didn’t respond for twenty minutes. Then, far to the east of where he’d been, he made an echoing bleat and strutted into the field. His head turned blue, then red, and then deathly white as he paced in the grass, checking his flank. Saying, Where is this goddamn hen that won’t move? Make me chase you, I don’t think so. He was king in his world. I shot him and through a puff of gun smoke noted the spot where he should have fallen. The walk into the field stretched my legs. Standing over empty ground, I wondered at the power of this bird, half idiot, half genius, to disappear. I had shot him, I swear.
On my walk home, I followed one of my neighbor’s trails into a wooded ravine, and back up to leafy woods pocketed with red pine. A clean scent moved through the forest on the breeze, so strong I could only follow. The air was sweet. I stepped off the path and into shadow. Pushing through black branches knit together, eventually I came to a small open ring with an emerald floor of moss, princess pine, and jack-in-the-pulpit. The break in the woods hid a treasure: standing three feet off the ground, in the shade of a maple, a single wild azalea bloomed pink, its flowers swaying as if exhausted with scent.
“Look at you,” I said. I took a knee near the plant and brushed aside some dead leaves on the ground. With my knife, I gathered two shoots. Fighting my way back to the path, I cradled the plants like baby birds in my cupped palm.
Back home I grabbed a serving fork from a kitchen drawer and went back outside. I considered the lay of the land and settled on a roadside tree line with a rotting split-rail fence in it. In went the wild azalea, no longer wild, nice and easy.
NEXT MORNING was clear and dry. A tom had run me around since about five a.m., and I was having eye trouble to where I couldn’t see getting to work on time. I had just got home, stripped off my camo, put up the shotgun, and started the kettle for coffee, when my friend Ed Brennan called. The call changed quite a bit, then and in years to follow.
Ed is a large, loud man, but on the phone that morning his voice was a murmur, telling a story I didn’t want to know the end to. I got dressed in three minutes and, with my coffee sloshing out of its cup, drove down to Fitzmorris.
The Brennans live on a small farm outside Fitzmorris, which you may know is the Holebrook County seat. Liz Brennan is the town’s general practitioner, and Ed owns a high-end construction business specializing in timber frame buildings. He has a few skilled guys but he’ll take his workers from anywhere, rehab placements, whatever, as long as they can work. The Brennans have two young kids, a boy and a girl. Ed and I went to high school together, oh, fifteen-twenty years ago. I’m close with their family. They’ve helped me through troubles. And I might as well say that if you knew Liz, you’d understand how I could love her with the purity of a dog’s love, and be in no better position than a dog to express how I felt, and have no more chance of pursuing her romantically than a dog would have. She’s my best friend’s wife. I’m telling everything else, so I might as well admit that too. My life was much simpler when I had my own wife, but I scattered her ashes out West, and she’s hard to reach.
I pulled into the yard of the white farmhouse. Ed stood in the doorway. He gave me a small wave and moved inside. On the porch, one of Ed’s guys sat slumped in a chair. Duct tape held the toes of his boots shut. A baseball cap hid his face, but that didn’t matter. It was Kevin O’Keeffe, the fellow who lived with his girlfriend Penny in a trailer on Andy Swales’s land up to Maiden’s Grove. I wasn’t sure whether he was asleep or awake until I took the stairs. He shifted and tried to stand. I waved him back and pulled a chair around to face him.
“Are we doing this here?” he asked.
“Not sure what it is we’re doing,” I said.
“Ed didn’t say?”
“Why don’t you tell me?”
Kev glanced toward Ed’s front door, then back at me. “You’re not taking me in?”
“What is this all about, and we’ll go from there.” I had no place to hold Kevin in my tiny station. Not for longer than an hour or so. There was no doubt that this, if it was anything, would be kicked over to the county.
O’Keeffe lowered his voice. “I didn’t kill her.” He wore a T-shirt, and I looked at his arms for scratches and bruises. His sunburned skin was scraped and lined, nothing fresh, though.
“But she’s gone,” I said.
“Yeah. I get home two nights ago, the place is busted.”
“About what time did you get in that night?”
“I don’t know, two-thirty? There’s some, ah . . . Jesus, oh, God.” He hid his face in his hands, which were cracked and dry, then looked up again. “But I don’t notice . . . what I should have. I was drunk. I passed out. I guessed she was mad about something, me staying out late or what, and then she’d be back. No shape to go after her. Next morning, still no Penny. I called her phone, I called her sister, called her folks, no nothing. Looking around, you know, I should’ve seen. I went to work.
“Come night, still no Penny. Her car ain’t moved. I made some more calls and went out hitting the bars. Binghamton, Endicott, down to Fitzmorris. Nobody’s seen her.” He raised a hand to pick at his eye. The hand trembled.
“Okay. Now, what about this, you said you shot somebody? That can’t be right, right?” Ed had told me this part of the story over the phone, without details. It didn’t fit. No gunshot wounds had come into Holebrook or in neighboring counties. Likely this was a bad dream or a delirium from too much or too little alcohol in the blood.
Kevin gave no reply, and then, “I shouldn’t have said that. Forget that, I’m wrong, I was drunk. I didn’t shoot nobody.”
“Okay, so where was it that you didn’t shoot anybody?”
Kevin sighed and raised his eyes to the heavens.
“Where’s the gun?” I said.
He put an index finger to his temple and pretended to blow his brains out. It was not for my benefit, I don’t think. Our eyes met, and I knew that something was wrong with Kevin, and with the little place where our lives met.
“Tell me where you’ve been, Kev. You’ve got to tell me right now.”
“Promise me you’ll go after Penny. She could be . . . we’re wasting time.”
“Stand up, please.” I patted him down, catching body odor th
at was sharp like cheese, sweet like bread or beer. No weapon.
“If she’s dead, I didn’t kill her.”
“Well,” I said. O’Keeffe extended his wrists to be cuffed. I shook my head. “How’d you get here?”
“Walked.”
“Where’s your truck?”
He gave me a helpless look. “I don’t know.”
I put an arm on his shoulder and steered him to my vehicle.
On the drive to the sheriff’s, I thought about my visit to their home that winter, and about their history. You show up to a domestic call expecting to see people still in the grip of the fight that got you called out, clawing, screaming. You come to somebody’s defense, chances are they let you in on a punch or two. You’re the person they hate more than each other. That January night when I had pulled up to the trailer off Dunleary, my blue lights dancing off the white woods, with Swales’s house barely visible through the tree trunks, it was quiet. I knocked and stepped inside. The first thing O’Keeffe asked me was to turn off my lights so the landlord wouldn’t know I’d been called.
When I returned, the two of them were sitting in the kitchen, Penelope at the table, Kevin on the floor with his back to the refrigerator. Penelope Pellings was lovely, with long chestnut hair and teeth that protruded slightly past her lips. A small woman, small and thin. Kev O’Keeffe had long hair pulled straight back in a ponytail and wore several ropy, beaded necklaces over a hand-knitted sweater. Neither spoke as I stomped snow off my boots and ducked inside. The only signs of struggle were Penelope’s flaring nostrils, a butcher’s knife in front of her on the table, and bloody paper towels wrapped around O’Keeffe’s hand.
Had they been drinking? Yes, a bit. Drugs? No, they said. Back then, it didn’t really matter to me what started it all; there had been an argument, a struggle, a door slammed shut and held closed against Penny. The last straw. She had taken out the sharpest knife in the block and waited.
The knife was a mirror, and what they saw in it, they barely recognized. It ended the fight, and now, with O’Keeffe’s hand dripping blood on the floor, the overwhelming sense I got from both of them was shame. I asked to speak with Penelope alone, and O’Keeffe agreed.
We stepped outside and, despite the puffy jacket she had wrapped around her, she began to shiver. “We had a fight, I lost my shit.” Her hands clutched each other as if preventing their own flight, the wild flight of bats. “He never hit me.”
“Good.”
Penny looked off into the woods. “Sometimes I can’t keep on with this.”
“With what?”
“What does he care? Working on these fall-down barns. Getting fucked up every night—not drunk, fucked up—waking up and doing it again. Never going to get our girl back that way. I been through the fuckin program, I been clean. But still CPS says I have to do this or that. When is our life going to be what it is? I know people have to do whatever, but I never thought I’d be living like this. Sorry. You don’t need to hear it.”
“You were trying to, what, get him to stop drinking?”
“Something like that. Listen, believe it or not, Henry, I didn’t call for you.”
“Oh, no?”
She caught my dubious tone. “Nobody tells me how it is, not him, not anybody. Nobody has a thumb that fuckin big. He drank too much to get himself to the hospital in the snow, and he won’t admit he should go get the hand looked at, and if he doesn’t he won’t be working at all. Then we’ll have real problems. I called for an ambulance.” She tapped her breastbone with her palm. “He’s trying to protect me, saying it isn’t bad. If he isn’t hurt too bad, then . . .”
Then the fight wasn’t anything for me to tell CPS about. “I’ll radio.”
I went back to my truck and raised the emergency squad, then stepped back inside to wait. Penelope had taken a seat on Kevin’s lap and was plucking at his hair. I wondered whether this show of affection might be for my benefit. At the time it seemed more genuine than not. Of course I worried about her.
I looked at them both, wondering what to say. “Please tell me I won’t be back here for anything like this ever again.”
“You won’t,” Kevin said.
“So what do you two want, where do you want to go with this?”
“Nowhere,” said Kevin.
“Vacation?” said Penelope.
NEARLY HALF a year later, as Kevin O’Keeffe and I sat on a bench in the basement hallway of the Holebrook County Courthouse and waited, I tried not to feel that I had missed something important. Since our encounter that winter, Kevin had let himself go to where he was almost a street person. Teeth the color of old newspaper, voice burred by smoke, skin swollen tight on his face but dried to horn on his hands. He’d gone from an affable youngish hippie to one of those guys you see, and we all probably know at least one, riding his bicycle to the distributor for his daily thirty-pack, looking both older and younger than he should.
A patrolman led us into an empty conference room, and O’Keeffe and I sat at a chipped wooden table until Sheriff Dally knocked at the window. I left the room and joined him in the hall. Dally and the patrolman listened as I laid out the situation as quickly and fully as I could.
Dally turned to his guy. “Call the hospitals again. Check down to Dunmore and Wyoming, see if the state police have anything from last night that might fit.”
When the patrolman had left, Dally said to me, “How do you want to handle this, will he talk to us both?”
I said I thought so. The question was a courtesy; Dally was going to step in. I liked him as a sheriff and a person. But he was a trifle stiff, as many descendants of the Scots Presbyterians who founded Fitzmorris tended to be, and disposed to believe he was not only right, but in the right. I’d heard him refer to his job more than once as “whack-a-mole.” His world and Kevin’s didn’t intersect except at the point of citation, and that’s maybe what the county needs out of a sheriff—distance, a lordliness. With my upbringing I didn’t have the luxury of arm’s-length policing. Everyone was somebody’s uncle or cousin. Over the past couple years I’d been on the job in Wild Thyme, the sheriff had come to see that I could be useful talking to certain kinds of people. The indigent, the iron-spined, the woodchucks.
Dally knocked on the window and opened the door. We all said hello, and then nothing. A wary silence had settled over O’Keeffe.
“You need anything?” I asked. “Water, soda?”
“How about, you know, just a little smooth-over?” He lit a half-smoked cigarette, flattened from his pocket. “I hate to ask, you know. I understand. Shit—what time is it?” He chuckled with no happiness. “Now isn’t the time, I understand that. Practically speaking, it just . . . it would help me get it together. Okay, had to ask. She’s gone. You going to help me?”
“In my younger days,” said the sheriff, eventually, “when I drank too much on a Friday night? I’d wake up feeling sick in my stomach, sick in my head. Soul-sick. I knew I’d done something, didn’t know what. If I couldn’t remember, it almost wasn’t real, that thing I did.” Dally paused, produced a small recording device, and placed it in the middle of the table, where it sat, drawing our eyes. “But there was a dent in the pickup that wasn’t there yesterday. A rip in my shirt, a black eye, those were real. Sometimes I’d call up a buddy and say, Hey, I don’t really want to know, but what happened? And it was better to know. Often things weren’t so bad as they seemed. It wasn’t really me. I had to remind myself of that. I’d been drinking.”
O’Keeffe wasn’t buying it. Dally waved a hand at the recorder. “This is what we call a noncustodial interview. You aren’t under arrest, and so far as I know, you haven’t done a thing wrong. You’re here because you want to be and we want you to be. You’re free to go anytime. Yeah?”
“Okay.”
“Don’t get stage fright if I record us. It’s an interview. So if you say something that’s useful later, we have it down.”
“Useful how?”
“We
don’t know yet. You say your girlfriend’s gone. We don’t know. But if she’s in trouble, details will help.”
O’Keeffe sank deeper in his chair and nodded his assent.
“Say it, please, so we have it.”
“Okay, I said.”
There were gaps in the account he gave. Just as he had done with me, he insisted on a few things: He got home around two-thirty a.m., May 18. Penelope was gone, the place kicked apart. His search the following night had ended somewhere in Fitzmorris. Interviews don’t just roll out one-and-done. They get repeated and repeated, facts change and change back, minor points get insisted on and later dropped, all in search of the one useful lie or truth. We went over it a couple more times. O’Keeffe claimed to have spent the night of the supposed disappearance partying with some others in a clearing on the north shore of Maiden’s Grove, really just standing around drinking and, presumably, smoking weed. Locals sometimes parked on Dunleary Road and took a trail through Swales’s land to do this. Sometimes they’d park up near Kevin and Penelope’s place. No, nobody had parked up by their trailer that night, only on Dunleary. O’Keeffe was unsure who would be able to account for his whereabouts. Was Penelope down by the shore? Sure, but she’d left alone, back up the hill to the trailer. There were no loners, no strangers with them.
“Did she ever go swimming in the lake?” I asked. “Not necessarily that night.”
“Yeah,” Kevin said, then caught my meaning. “No, no, she was a strong swimmer, she went all the time. All the time. Not that night, of course, lake’s too cold yet. Listen. You have to get out there and find her. I’m begging you.”
“In good time,” I said.
“This guy you’re supposed to have shot,” Dally said.
“Man, come on. For the last time, I was wrong, let it go. You need to go see my place. I need you to believe me.”
“Well, I would,” said Dally. “Only, you said before, you shot a man last night. It’s not something you’d make up or forget—”
“No, no, no. No.”
“And if this guy is lying somewhere, bleeding, dying, and you have a chance to save his life, it’s—”