Fateful Mornings

by Tom Bouman

  Late afternoon I was back to my blind on the edge of Buckles’s property, waiting. The brown sedan clanked up the driveway just before five-thirty. Buckles’s Day-Glo-yellow shirt was covered in black smears, and he looked tired. He slumped up the stairs and into the house, but surprised me by reappearing on the porch in athletic shorts and sneakers, and setting out for a jog. I put my face in the grass and listened to his steps vanish up Hurrier Lane. It wasn’t too long before he returned. Buckles had gone to fat but iron lay beneath, and each step up the drive was a sledgehammer falling. He stopped by the house, bent over with his hands on his knees, and puked a small amount. Standing, he rocketed stray vomit out of his ruined nose, wiped his mouth, and looked around him with particular care. My face was down, buried in field grass, and when at last I raised my eyes again he was picking through the junk in his yard. He paused before a blue barrel, lifted the lid, and looked inside. Something tightened in his face. He reached in and fished out a fifth of some neon-green spirit, probably schnapps. He downed a mouthful and put it back and went inside.

  I trotted back to my patrol truck, removed my camo, traded my boonie hat for my cap, and drove back to Buckles’s place. I had not climbed the stairs and set one foot on the porch before I heard a bellow.

  “Back out! Back out! Back out!”

  I put my hand to the .40 on my hip and identified myself as police.

  “I don’t care,” said Buckles, shirtless, thudding onto the porch with a loaded crossbow pistol in his hand. A felon’s handgun. “Back out.”

  “You know me, Sage,” I said. “Put that thing down before you end up on the news.”

  His expression lost no ferocity, but he raised the crossbow in the opposite direction from me and without looking, pulled the trigger. The bolt took a chunk of wood out of the porch railing and winged into the yard. He set the weapon down and said, “What do you want?”

  “Can I come in?”

  “No.”

  “Sage, I’m authorized to come in on the terms of your plea.”

  “Fuck you, then, do it.”

  I put my head inside and smelled old food. “Hope around?”

  “She ain’t here no more. She’s back in Beaver. It gets to where you can’t do what you want to do in your home without someone stepping in. I told her the woods ain’t no place to get sober, but she thinks with me in my situation, with you all up my ass, it’ll work. Of course it didn’t work. She’s back home.”

  “In rehab?”

  “Something like that, I don’t know. What do you want?”

  “I’m here to show you something.”

  Sage took both police sketches in his hands and said, “Seen him on TV. What do I know him for?”

  “I don’t know. I just had a feeling.”

  “Yins always blame me. I don’t know him, what am I supposed to know him for? How? You see where I live.”

  “You know Vicki Jelinski?”

  “Who? I don’t know anyone.”

  “You knew Penny Pellings,” I said.

  “Yeah, I knew her, but . . . so fuckin what? So did a lot of guys.”

  I took a moment to assess the man before me. Arms folded, chin back, eyes like a pinball machine. “You knew her. Penny.”

  “I’m telling you, she was out nights, and I was out. A lot of people knew her.”

  “And you had something she wanted.”

  “I could say something but I won’t.”

  I ignored his ugly smile and said, “How come if you live out here all alone, you have enough of what she wants to draw her in?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Heroin. Where’d you get it?”

  “Can you hear right?”

  “Maybe not. But I can smell good,” I said. “And I smell something fuckin awful. What kind of ladies’ night you having up in here? Is that . . . watermelon schnapps?”

  He fell silent. “Hope,” he said. “Dopey Hopey came out from Beaver with a bag. I was just trying to make money, get on my feet.”

  “And your straight job wasn’t enough.”

  “Sure it was. I was just spinning straw to gold.”

  “I’m curious,” I said. “How’d you come to settle in this place, anyway? What’s here that isn’t in Beaver?”

  “Work, I don’t know. I did the same thing out there, but it dried up. So I head east.” Buckles seemed glad to get on a new subject. “I see this place, ain’t nobody lived in it years, it’s cheap, I think maybe I’ll fix it up. Flip it, maybe.”

  “Ah. If nobody lived in it, who’d you buy it from?”

  “A local guy. A lawyer.”

  “Andy Swales?”

  “Who? No, an old guy named Noonan.”

  “You get along with your neighbors?”

  “I’m telling you, bud, I don’t know anybody. I used to clear trees and get drunk. Now I just clear trees. Is this America?”

  WITH KEVIN GONE, my moonlighting job with Ed Brennan became permanent, and I followed his crew from site to site as they gathered material that they would need to build Willard’s studio. Ed was in full artisan mode, exploring, spending his own money, and making fine distinctions.

  One evening I worked along the side of a barn, jamming a crowbar under the fascia boards and ripping them off the ends of the roof. A century of bird, bat, and rodent shit, straw, dust, and powdered wood had gathered in the spaces between the rafters, and I’d gotten a faceful pulling my first few boards. I peered up, shoved the crow under the board, and heard a squeaking scrabble within, just as a warm, wet spray coated my face, some in my eye, some in my mouth. I spat, but it was too late: bat’s blood. Part of the animal came out on the tip of the crowbar. A quick, unfair death.

  I cursed. Below me and off to the side, Julie Meagher was prying nails out of siding boards, every so often stopping to retrieve the metal off of the driveway with a magnet on a stick. She had been doing this all day. Hearing me, she looked up and saw my bloody face.

  “A bat,” I said.

  “Sick!”

  I threw the bar in the dirt. “I’m going up to the creek.”

  “Me too.” She unbuckled her tool belt, revealing a band of sweaty cloth around her midriff. We walked in the direction of the woods. “Don’t get me wrong, I love pulling nails,” she said, “but it’s not as if I can’t use a speed square and a circ saw. We’re always tearing shit apart. When are we going to actually put this thing together, is what I want to know?”

  “We don’t always know what we’re doing until we’re doing it.”

  “I’m going to dream about barn siding.”

  Often I had occasion to consider what made Ed’s timber-frame buildings rise to the level of art, at least as far as some people thought. In art, I’m told, there is nothing new under the sun, nothing new since man tamed fire. Except ways of seeing things. Everywhere in Holebrook County barns lasted long past their usefulness, until they became land itself. If you cleaned one up, laid its joinery and beams bare, put in windows, evicted nature, I guess you could call it what you want to. If it was art, you couldn’t make it without spilling some bat’s blood.

  Julie removed her work boots and sat on a rock upstream from me as I cleaned my face and hands. I took a couple glances at her as she reclined, the thickness of her body, the way everything about her fit together in a kind of easy strength. She was I guess a bit younger than me but had grown up in the area, and had been a jock, a soccer player in fall and a miler in spring. I’d played high school football, so I was familiar with the edges of that—go, Hawks. But our worlds were different. We were different. She seemed to know everyone in town, young and old. An enthusiast, a joiner. Where I’d been raised by a father like an ironwood tree. He never took off his camo except on Sunday, when we’d sit in an off-brand church and hear peculiar, harsh beliefs. My family’s home had been small, and in the hills, and I barely graduated high school. I hardly knew what to say to somebody like Miss Julie if we didn’t have an MVA or an overdos
e to occupy us.

  When we got back to the barn, two of the crew shook their heads in mock disapproval. Ed had arrived from some other site and was sticking his nose into everyone’s work. Julie sidled up to him, hip-checked him gently, and followed him inside the structure. Them two were always joking.

  That night I called Liz to ask what I ought to do, and she said come in to the clinic and she’d give me the brace of rabies shots I probably didn’t need but couldn’t risk skipping.

  So early the next morning I was waiting for her in the clinic parking lot. She smiled kindly enough when she pulled in. We walked up the stairs and into the white-walled suite, white walls with scuffs and dings and mismatched waiting-room chairs. I told her, in some detail, what had happened.

  “I don’t know, though,” I said. “Rabies is in the spit. So isn’t this backwards? My spit, his blood.”

  Liz shrugged, pulled her hair into a ponytail, and unwrapped a syringe. “I’m going to stick you.”

  “Bats are everywhere. I have one behind one of my shutters on the porch.”

  She gave me the injection. “You don’t have rabies, man, but if you do, it’s a bad way to go. It’s best to be careful.” She gathered the trash and the syringe and disappeared into the next room, calling, “You are being careful, right, Henry?”

  “What do you mean?” I said. But I knew.

  She returned. “I just wish that if you have . . . unfinished business out there, that, that you don’t screw the pooch. It’s a small town. I hear stuff.”

  There was forgiveness in her tone, but it was clear she knew something. The truth was that I missed Shelly Bray’s company, but even if I wanted to see her, there was no way I could, not anymore. I nodded. “It’s over with.”

  “Okay, honey,” she said. “You have two more shots to go. Come back in a week.”

  THE BARN of the moment was in Susquehanna County, north of the borough of Susquehanna and east of the river. Evenings, I joined the crew there and spent a couple hours cutting briars away from the structure and heaping rotten siding in a pile. The hills were still green, but starting to burst out in vermilion and orange. Still, summer had elbowed its way into the fall, and it stayed hot. I had just removed my shirt and doused myself with water when Ed arrived. He put his hands on his hips and examined the frame where the siding had been peeled way.

  “It’s a Frankenstein, a kludge,” he said. “Everything sistered on everywhere. I don’t know what does what. We’ll see what we get. Hey, I want to show you something.”

  At that moment, Julie Meagher came up, her face raccooned in dust from where she’d worn safety goggles. “Can I come?”

  “Sure, sure, sure,” said Ed, too quickly to be cool.

  We got in his truck, Julie riding the middle seat, her hip pressed against mine. Ed drove up a logging trail just to the tree line, where he parked and we got out. He took a small cooler and we walked a trail through brush and into deep woods. The day had been like the flat of a knife in the sun, but turned cool and fluid in the trees. Pale green ferns curled around boulders. We crossed where a stream had dried and left only cracked mud, and proceeded up a steep slope to where daylight broke in again. A quarry, now abandoned, had been cut into the mountainside, a clatter of gray stone sliding into a leveled clearing. Pinks grew in clusters among the stone pieces. The view east encompassed the entire Starrucca Creek valley, the creek itself where it met the Susquehanna River below, sparkling in the slanting light, and the railroad viaduct winding north in the crook of a mountain.

  “The Erie Railway,” Ed said. “The bridge is what, a hundred fifty, hundred sixty years old, actually. And they still use it. It’s made of blue shale. We might be standing on the place where the stone came from.” We each opened a beer. Ed ­patted at his overalls pockets, found a corncob pipe, and filled it with tobacco and weed. “Look at how it fits right in there.” He framed the viaduct with his hands, and placed them in front of Julie’s face. “All nice.”

  “All nice,” she repeated, handing me the pipe without smoking.

  On the walk back to the truck, a low patch of color caught my eye: a cluster of mushrooms the color of saffron with whitish undersides. “Oh, ho ho!” I said, dropping to my knees. I gathered a handful of interlocked fungus and showed it to the others. “Chicken of the woods,” I said. “You wouldn’t believe it. Fry them in a little batter and it’s just like chicken. Or in an omlette. It’s . . . magic.” Without thinking, I stuck my arm out in Julie’s direction, and she took them, thanking me.

  Ed idled by our parked cars a moment and said, “Want to get beers?”

  “I would,” I said.

  “I won’t,” said Julie. “I’m going to go home and cook these, actually. Eat ’em.”

  “Good luck,” said Ed. “At least you’ve got medical training. You know, I should head home too.”

  That night I looked through my three guidebooks on fungi, fretting over the chicken of the woods. When they had been in my hands, I was sure of the species; I had picked and eaten them many times. But now that I had foisted them on someone else, my brain began to play with me. Had it been Laetiporus Cincinnatus or Laetiporus sulphureus? That didn’t matter so much, but if it had been huroniensis, good night, that could poison Miss Julie with vomiting, chills, and hallucinations. It got to be ten o’clock and I got out my Fitzmorris telephone book and found “J. Meagher” listed. It took me some minutes to force myself to dial her number. My relief when she answered was beyond reason.

  “Henry Farrell here,” I said. “Sorry to call at home. Uh, you feel fine, right?”

  “Should I not?”

  “Did you eat the mushrooms?”

  “Sure did. I had them in an omelet with a glass of pinot. Why? Wait, man, actually . . . I don’t feel very well.”

  “Okay. Uh—”

  “Kidding, I looked them up first. How sweet of you to check on me.”

  “Sure. Sure, sure.”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, uh, see you tomorrow, maybe.”

  “See you.”

  LIEUTENANT SLEIGHT and I sat in a hall on a bench beside a Broome County courtroom door. The older cop had testified earlier in the trial of Christian “Dizzy” Kostis, as had Detectives Oates and Larkins. The lieutenant was keeping me company while I waited. I had wanted to move away from that night in Binghamton’s First Ward, far away from it, and I had convinced myself everyone would plead out like they always do. Only, Dizzy hadn’t, so I’d come into the picture.

  “Don’t fuss,” Sleight said.

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s just a bench trial. It’s a show. It’s all over but the years.”

  Kostis had waived a jury and pinned all his hopes on the cold, clear-eyed reasoning of one lone judge. Meaning he didn’t want a jury full of citizens to get their hands on the facts. An assistant DA named Michelle Knobel had filled me in the night before by phone. Bobby Chase had testified against both Max and Dizzy for reduced charges and a lighter sentence, casting himself as a hapless visitor there at the wrong time, bludgeoned and accused of terrible crimes. The prosecution had gotten the victim to talk as well, so there wasn’t much left to fight over. On the stand, on direct I’d give a bare account of my night with Dizzy leading up to the arrest. Kostis’s lawyer would certainly cross me, but the DA told me not to worry, I’d done nothing wrong, everyone knew that. I’d authenticate the handgun I’d taken from Dizzy. He already had a felony conviction on his record, so simply possessing it was a misdemeanor, and he had used it in connection with a slew of Class B violent offenses, separate felonies all their own, likely to bury him in prison for at least fifteen years.

  As I waited to take my turn at the crank of justice, I tried to recall that night, a haze of alcohol and weed smoke burned off by a violent end. I thought of the teenage girl and other things.

  “Any word on Penny Pellings these days?” I asked.

  “No. I’d ask you, but . . .”

  “Yeah. Everybody’s looking
someplace else. For the fugitive.”

  “Yeah, about that—”

  A sheriff’s deputy leaned out the courtroom door and beckoned to me. Sleight patted my knee kindly and I stood and went in. The lieutenant followed behind and took a seat in the rear of the gallery, which was otherwise empty. Judge Mondello, a large balding gray-bearded man with a nose like an eagle’s beak, watched me enter and take the stand. Assistant DA Michelle Knobel stood at the prosecution table. A tall, middle-aged lawyer sat with legs stretched out beyond the defense table, hands clasped behind his head, leaning over while Dizzy murmured something behind his hand. The prisoner met my gaze with hatred. The bailiff swore me in and I took a seat under what felt like an enormous weight of wood paneling all around.

  After a couple preliminary questions—who was I, what was my job—Knobel tackled the gun, probably thinking if I was going to be impeached, what she most needed from me was testimony of the weapon in Dizzy’s hand. She held up a plastic bag with the gun inside. Had I seen it? Yes. When?

  “That night, I was with Christian Kostis, in a house here in town, uh.” I blanked on the address, and Knobel refreshed my recollection with an arrest report. “Yes, at that address. He had it there.”

  Did I see Mr. Kostis here in the courtroom? Yes, right there. Dizzy breathed heavily. I could hear it from the stand.

  “Mr. Kostis had the handgun,” echoed Knobel. “Did he wave it around, or . . . ?”

  “Mr. Kostis took me to the house—”

  “Objection,” said the defense lawyer.

  The deputy led me out of the courtroom while the two attorneys argued some fine point in whispers before the judge. Before long I was brought back in and re-sworn. The rest of the direct proceeded more or less chronologically through the early events of that night, up until the moment of arrest. I put the pistol in Dizzy’s hand and Knobel had no further questions.