Fateful Mornings

by Tom Bouman

  “I’m not doing that.”

  It had turned into an itchy, sunny day and the air was stubborn. I moved around the fire ring and found views to the well pad, the lake below, even part of the roof of Swales’s house. There was nothing left in the pit but cinders. Closing my eyes, I listened beyond and below the thrumming and clanking of the rig. A person approached through the brush. I lowered myself down and watched as Patrolman Hanluain worked his way into the clearing, sweaty and aggrieved.

  “What the hell?” he said as I stood. “What the hell anymore?”

  We two searched the hill, checked the closed-up cottages for signs of disturbance, then tipped our hats to Rhonda Prosser, out on a deck chair reading, and asked if she’d seen any strange customers that morning. Nothing turned up. Back at the station I called our wildlife officer Shaun Loughlin to tell him about the dead animals. He said he’d check it out and notify the DCNR and the EPA, see if they’d do their job. I also left Andy Swales a message, as it was his land. I couldn’t very well not. Buckles had not done as I asked; the motel desk clerk in Fitzmorris hadn’t seen him. I passed by his house several times that day and into the night. What a unique chance, I thought, to reverse-engineer some fracking waste, but no. How much he’d swallowed or inhaled, or what effect it would have on him, I couldn’t tell. We’d never know if he stayed gone. More immediate than that was getting to why he’d been attacked. I left another message with Sergeant Resnik out in Beaver and kept my eyes on the country roads.

  THE JUKEBOX cut off in the middle of a southern rock jam, and crowd noise swept in to take its place. Ed handed a flask around. We Country Slippers filed out to our corner as the room fell silent. A group of Shure SM58 microphones, duct tape on the mics, duct tape on the stands, stood between us and an audience of about forty or so well-wishers. As we took our places, Ed’s microphone slowly drooped to the floor in its stand like a monk touching his head to the ground, with an amplified thud. He raised it. It fell again. He looked over at me with naked terror in his eyes. A kind soul emerged from the crowd and wrapped yet more tape around the stand. To the left of us, a mechanical hiss: someone had turned on a smoke machine. A spurt of white vapor turned psychedelic in the flashing lights of the juke. Fogged in, I started us on “Shove That Pig’s Foot Further in the Fire,” a favorite of the band with a triumphant part B, a tune we eventually merged with “Fire in the Log,” also known as “Who Shit in Grandpa’s Hat.”

  The High-Thyme Tavern was an institution of long standing, ill repute, and several personalities, depending on season and time of night. In winter, you might find a gang of snowmobilers giving off fumes of fuel and sweat, bibs undone and hanging at their waists. Or you might see one old-timer measuring out a night in cigarettes, old jokes, and jukebox dollars. Summer drew all kinds, including well-to-do folk, known reprobates, and everything in between. Naturally Ed Brennan might be found there any time of year, and earlier that September evening I’d found him and Liz socked away at the far end of a screened porch, tuning and plunking. I caught a drift of marijuana smoke. Ed craned his neck around me in an exaggerated gesture, then palmed me the pipe, which I crouched down to hit. The day had been hot, but autumn nights came down colder, and as the sun set, we began to see the foolishness of trying to tune outdoors only have our strings go wild again once we brought our instruments into the bar.

  Two sets at the High-Thyme Tavern, for money. I wasn’t worried, as I ranked pretty high among fiddlers in Holebrook County. Ed, though, had the mee-mees and twice walked stiff-legged to the men’s room to empty his bowels. Over the summer we’d added a drummer of sorts, a hippie of Ed’s acquaintance named Ralph Lilly who was near sixty and wore thinning white hair in a ponytail. I’d been skeptical at first when he’d hauled congas, a cabasa, various sticks, shakers, tambourines, and djembes of different sizes to the Brennans’ backyard for a “jam.” It wasn’t long before he settled on a kind of wooden box on which he sat and slapped out a punctuating rhythm that reminded me of Jim Keltner’s drumming on early Ry Cooder records. When I stopped noticing he was even doing it, I knew it was working. Anyways, this guy didn’t drink, only indulged in weed and other things I didn’t ask about, and he showed up just before eight. By 8:25 we were on the dance floor, sweating into the suits we’d all agreed to wear except Liz, who looked fresh in a dress of Day-Glo paisley.

  We were several tunes in before I came back from the unstruck chord and looked around. I stood far left so my bow didn’t poke anybody in the eye. Liz was to my immediate right playing an open-backed banjo, clawhammer style; we stood close enough to touch shoulders. Guitar and box provided texture and bottom but it was fiddle and banjo that needed to interlock to make the tunes danceable. And we did that: not only Julie and her people were out there, but rednecks, hippies, and retirees. Their whoops and off-time claps became part of the music. I clogged a bit and did a couple fiddle tricks.

  A few more dance tunes, and we took time for a ballad, “Gathering Flowers,” which Liz sang sweetly and without a hint of costume jewelry. Out in the wildwood gathering flowers, you know. I stepped back because it was just the vocal for the first verse. I looked around. Julie Meagher was easy to pick out, I’d seen her about three or four people back, her blond hair tucked behind her ears, a lodestar out there. We’d made plans to meet at the bar that night and get a beer afterward. But someone else was pulling my gaze in. I cast my eye about and there was Jennie Lyn Stiobhard with Pam Maddox in a rare public appearance. Having caught my eye, she winked, then gestured for me to meet her outside. I missed a few bars of the tune.

  During the break between sets I checked in with Julie, who was most complimentary of the band. Outside, I took note of Ed, pissing into the tree line out back, hands on hips, gazing at the stars above. I waited by the horseshoe pits until Ed had gone back inside, and there was Jennie, stepping out from the shadows of the rear lot.

  “I didn’t know you could play like that,” she said. “My great-uncle Colum could play that way. I remember him visiting. He could barely even see. I’d pay to hear you guys play, man, that’s something.”

  “Kind of you, Jennie.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, man.”

  “What’s on your mind?”

  “Some little squirrel been making his nests,” she said, naming three remote locations in the township.

  “And?”

  “We’d talk to him if we could catch him, but we only see what’s left behind. He moves around—he’s good at that. Anyways, brother Alan thought you’d want to know in case it’s to do with the girl. He thinks it may be.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  I sensed someone, and Julie walked up, smiling.

  “Evening, sweetheart,” Jennie told her. To me: “We’ll be out tonight. Out along Sprains Road.” I nodded. Jennie Lyn ambled in the direction of the parking lot.

  Julie’s eyes showed curiosity, but she restrained herself from asking questions. We found Adirondack chairs and talked nonsense in the dark for a few minutes.

  Some folks headed home after the first set. Those who remained got drunk. My mind was elsewhere; I made an approximation of fiddle music. After “Rose in the Mountain” ended, I set the fiddle in its case and ignored the smattering of calls for one more song.

  With pain in my heart, I found Julie Meagher at the bar, ordering two IPAs. She handed one to me, and I looked down at it.

  “You earned it,” she said. “What?”

  “I’ve got to go.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s work.”

  “Oh, really,” she said, giving my old-fashioned suit an up-and-down look. It was a chocolate-brown three-piece with yellow stripes. I had bought it for five dollars at the Christian consignment store in Fitzmorris and hung it on my line for two weeks.

  “Really,” I said. “I’ve got business out there. It can’t wait, or . . .”

  “Can I come?”

  Ed appeared between us and took my untouched pint. “Horrible hunting.”


  In a drawer at my station I kept an unofficial plat map on which I had scribbled landowners, rough estimates of pooled tracts, the locations of well pads, and wells sunk and fracked. Sprains Road was a piece of rubble that ran for 1.3 miles off Route 37 between a quarried-out hillside and a bend of January Creek on the eastern edge of the county, and then rejoined the paved road. There was nothing on it yet except a quarry owned by a partnership, the quarry now idle.

  Cassiopeia was out among the stars of the Milky Way, and moths and bats rode invisible currents in the air above me. I drove through the township without meeting a single car, and left my pickup on a dirt shoulder of Route 37 with an old T-shirt hanging out the window, looking like one of many abandoned trucks across the county.

  Brother Alan was the Stiobhard to worry about; I’d shot him once, but it wasn’t serious, and he had nothing particular against me these days. In fact he probably trusted me as much as he could anyone who wasn’t family, though he was not one to seek out the company of police. Alan had been running wild since we were teenagers, getting by however he could, sometimes with honest work, sometimes poaching, theft, sometimes making and selling drugs even after the cartels moved in with their supply of mass-produced crank and now heroin, automatic rifles, and loose teams of local animals to handle the business. They’d get busted and somebody new would come in. It put me in mind of a fast-food franchise. But Alan would not be pulled into anyone’s system. And if I had to predict, he was not going to die of old age, either. He’d stand toe-to-toe with someone bigger and lose, or he’d let down his guard and one night a jealous man would put a bullet in him.

  Sprains Road led to the creek valley. The quarry was ahead, behind a chained and padlocked gate. Quietly I walked the road in the dark, stopping to listen, hearing nobody out there with me. Softly, almost in my ear, a whistle through teeth. A hand found my shoulder, pulling me into the brush, and down to the earth behind a fallen tree. I turned my head to find Danny Stiobhard, whom I thought of as the loud brother of the three Stiobhard kids, and, behind him, the shadows of Jennie Lyn and Alan.

  Our group split, with Jennie and Alan moving silently past the entrance. Danny and I crept up the road and waited. There in the trees was an ancient two-door Oldsmobile, white and rusted, with New York plates. Beyond it, a faint orange flicker coming from the quarry, and the scent of a campfire. We moved into the woods along the edge of the hollow and up.

  We took a position beneath a patch of wild sumac. I’d thought only kids used the quarry anymore. Spray paint covered the rock faces: 2008. 2009. Elsewhere: WE HAVE ALL BEEN HERE FOREVER. Stone, cut but not worth enough to haul out and sell, lay stacked and piled below us, some of it racked on end. There was trash, too. And deep into the quarry, hard up against a cliff wall and shielded from the road by a bunker of stone and brush, a man sat beside a small fire. Through my field glasses I saw a shotgun and two blades set out on a cloth. A piece of mystery meat lay there, bloody. Tucked into the cover and facing the quarry gate was a rifle; I almost missed it. The man wore an army jacket with the collar up, his back to our position. One leg was tucked under him, and another was stretched out on the stone floor.

  Danny got so close to me I could feel the bristles on his face as he whispered in my ear. “You’re the cop. Go talk to him.” He braced a deer rifle to his shoulder and put the scope to his eye.

  He was right; if the stranger turned out to be someone, I’d want to go down and identify myself first thing. Arguably, his weapons gave me what lawyers would call an exigent circumstance, yet there wasn’t any law against being out in the woods with protection against coyotes, and there had been nothing to show the man was dangerous. I waited, watching; he hadn’t tipped that he knew we were there, and yet a hitch in his movements told me he was on alert. Silently as possible over fallen leaves I lowered myself to where the quarry leveled out. I stood hidden by the last line of brush, east ninety degrees out of the range of his rifle. The man was just below my sight line, about forty feet west.

  I took a deep breath and called, “Henry Farrell, Wild Thyme Police.”

  There was no answer at first. Then, “You have a gun on me?”

  “Should I?”

  The fire went out with a hiss and a smell of wet smoke. I heard movement and dove into the lee of a rock pile. He would go for his car. Maybe not first, but that’s where he’d want to end up. I scrambled across the stone plain to the smoke where he’d been: no knives, no shotgun. I pulled his rifle out and unloaded it, then stopped to listen. He’d lured me to his own exposed position, and I needed to get back to the woods.

  Up the hill, a shotgun thudded. I ran through the tree line into darkness, slid down, and listened. Silence, another shot. In the echo, I ran in the direction of the car, stopped. Heavy footfalls tumbled down the hill toward me. I pointed my .40 into the darkness and startled as bodies collided half seen. Two men grappled on the forest floor; a shotgun fired once more and buckshot scattered into the trees around me. I dropped, looked up, and saw Danny Stiobhard grinding the stranger’s head into the earth. Then a flash and a scream as a knife punched into Danny’s side. Danny rolled away and the man crawled from under him. My finger was on the trigger and I had his galloping, broken body in my sights, but I lost him in the shadows and pulled up against an ash tree.

  Below me, a car door opened and shut. I sprinted toward it; no sound followed. Hard to see into the car, but as I came to a stop I counted one head in the driver’s seat. I walked up slowly behind my .40 and hollered for the man to drop any weapons he had out the window. A gleam of metal, a hand clutching it, an arm: Jennie Lyn Stiobhard was in the back seat with a pistol to the back of the man’s skull. The two of them were talking low, and as I moved around the car I caught the words.

  “If you move again, I’ll kill you,” she said.

  “Do it, then,” said the man. “You ready?”

  He swept behind him with an arm and Jennie shied and cursed. Twisting himself around, the man slashed at Jennie with a knife, catching her jacket and maybe flesh. There was nowhere for her to go, no door out. For a long split second I readied myself to shoot, and once more was saved from having to—Alan charged out of the woods, broke the driver’s-side window with a rifle butt, and clubbed the man to sleep. I ripped open the door, pulled the stranger out, and handcuffed him while Alan wrapped a cord around his ankles. I told Jennie where I’d left brother Danny, but she didn’t have to go far; he was walking slowly down the access road, hand to his side, pale and fuming.

  He called out, “Did we earn our ten grand?”

  AS THE AMBULANCE shot toward Fitzmorris, the stranger opened his eyes.

  Out cold, stripped to a ragged pair of underpants, and handcuffed to a gurney, he had appeared almost helpless. He’d buzzed his hair and grown a patchy beard. The lump on his head, planted by Alan Stiobhard and his rifle, was the size of half a baseball and growing. His mouth hung slack, giving us a view of too-large teeth going yellow. Nowhere in his possessions had we found a toothbrush, anyway. No wallet either, no papers in the car, nothing with a name on it. From his ribs to his right knee was a wash of purple, green, and yellow bruise, like a kid’s fingerpainting. On his hip was a sharp line of red cutting through the bruise. Julie Meagher had told us it was a sign of a fracture. If he was who we thought, this was where the grandmother had hit him with the Town of Orange ambulance.

  It was to Julie that the stranger turned. His eyes contained no plea or sign of physical pain. It was an empty stare, compressing the space in the unit even further, shutting me and Lieutenant Sleight out, filling the air between himself and her with the promise of death. Sleight snapped his fingers in front of the man’s eyes, then, when that produced no change, turned the stranger’s head with a slap. “Right here, son.” The man looked up at Sleight, tested his restraints once, then rolled his head back in the direction of Julie Meagher.

  “Tell me all about it, honey,” Julie told him, cold. “Tell mama.”

  I read him his rig
hts.

  After I’d left the tavern, Miss Julie had gone home. But the radio squawked, and Wild Thyme’s rescue squad couldn’t put their team together, so the Fitzmorris gang had gotten toned out. Julie had taken the call, putting her unit in the center of a whirl of red and blue lights bouncing off the quarry’s cliffs and into the woods beyond. Sheriff Dally had come, and as news of the encounter traveled among the departments in the area, so had officers from PSP, New York State Police, and a couple Binghamton detectives, including Lieutenant Sleight. With so many of us in one place, even in a forgotten hole like the quarry, the news media wouldn’t be far away. So the most pressing question was where to take the show next.

  There was no question that if the stranger was who we thought, a New York State shop would take him. But he needed medical care immediately, and Dally was in the process of convincing a Troop C BCI detective that the hospital to the south, in Fitzmorris, would be quicker, quieter, and more secure. Lieutenant Sleight was arguing for Binghamton, making the point that, again, assuming the stranger was who we thought, his crimes originated in the Triple Cities. The NYS investigator was trying to get someone to tell him just how far the arrestee could travel in his condition, as Schuyler County had the best claim out of anyone by reason of Deputy Poole’s murder, so why not get him close as we can?

  Me, I was content to use Dally as a shield; he had the air of authority, not I. With the arrival of police, the Stiobhards had dissolved into the night air like a dream, leaving me to explain. I had given my account to Dally, written it down, told it once more to Sleight, who had pulled me aside, and told myself the story a dozen times or more; in the telling, it had taken an eye-blink, but what exactly had happened in the woods out of my sight, the Stiobhards had not yet said. I had kept their names out of it thus far and weathered stern looks from my fellow officers. It was easiest, then, to stand next to Julie Meagher and look busy.

  “It’s my damn county,” Dally had announced back at the quarry. “Settle down. We don’t know the shape he’s in. We need X-rays and an MRI. We need to tell the techs where they can get his samples. And he’ll have to go before a Holebrook County judge down here anyway as a fugitive of justice, if that’s who he is. It’s my county and I’m calling it. He’s coming with us until he’s cleared to travel.” The sheriff slapped the ambulance twice. “Henry, you ride down with him. Take . . .” he said, searching for a familiar face he could spare.