by Tom Bouman
As I wandered the field, I saw John Allen standing with friends, and had that odd feeling of betrayal when you catch teachers escaping the lives you had imagined for them. Onstage, a fiddler was getting some on a tune that had gone foreign, that had to be in Hypolydian mode, a strange ancient feeling of becoming that went well with the kicked-up dust of the field attaching itself to my teeth. Thinking back, it couldn’t have been Del’s band. But I remember feeling awe at this new sound, and meeting eyes with John, and him calling over to me, “Listen to that loose-armed idiot!” I considered his authority absolute, and that was his harshest criticism of a fiddler. He was a purist.
So as I faced John Allen once more, I expected a rebuke for the band, for our peregrinations and abominations.
What he said was, “That gal can play the banjo.”
“You said it.”
“Ten years ago, I’d have stolen her for myself.”
“Stay away, old man, she’s ours. Do you have your fiddle, you want to play a tune with us? Let me bring you on.”
“You got a time machine?” John held up his hands, curled and frozen. Unable to handle the fiddle any longer, he offered his services going forward as a dobro player, and he knew a bass player way over in Honesdale, and what about reviving the Holebrook County Old Time Society, and and and. “I hear you guys and I think you could be . . . I don’t know. I don’t know how to put it,” said he.
“Better?”
John Allen gave me a guilty smile. Over his shoulder, I caught a glance from eyes I knew and excused myself from John, only to face Miss Julie Meagher.
“Who’s that guy?” she said. “You sound like summertime.”
“You look like summertime,” I blurted.
“Aw.”
“Listen, I’m sorry I haven’t called.”
“No, me too,” she said. “Just . . . the winter, and you and your boxes,” she said.
I got dragged back for a second set. Julie was gone by the time we were done. John Allen was still there, but I snuck out the back door.
YEAH, the winter was bad. One sunny day in May, I lay in the yard with my cheek pressed to the grass. In the distance, hills poofed out in light green for another spring, and up close, right in front of my face, violets bloomed purple and white, shivering on green stalks. It was then I caught the scent.
I had no shoes on, and the muddy water oozing out of the earth began to numb my feet. In I went, into the woods, into the stand of pine where I’d once found that wild azalea and brought it home. For longer than I should have, I sat and contemplated that wildest of wildflowers. The seat of my pants got soaked. I dug up a shoot, found a pot to plant it in, and drove to Fitzmorris. I caught Julie on her way out the door; she was in her uniform and headed to work. I explained what the plant was.
She put her nose to it and said, “Goodness.”
“Not many like that.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” she said.
“Well, goodbye.”
“Meet me at the Low Road after my shift? Nine-thirty,” she said.
And at the Low Road we got drunk. We both needed to. Much was said about our pasts. It turns out Julie was more like me than I ever knew, a kind of refugee from another life. She’d been a sometime drug user from age fourteen on. Weed was easy to get and much beloved of the jam band culture up north, where she went to college. She’d bought from a late-night take-out counter. There was also code for cocaine, pills, ecstasy, heroin (which she never touched), certain words you had to say while ordering certain items, and there’d be something for you in your greasy bag.
Come med school down in Chapel Hill, the dealers were on the delivery model. Her boyfriend was from a wealthy Jewish family in Philadelphia, secular and left-leaning, and he’d come to school already deep in cocaine.
After they got expelled and he later stepped in front of a commuter train and died, she ended up a certified EMT in Asheville, where she knew a friend of a friend from college. Though it was lonely, she didn’t go out unless she was working, and cut drugs out of her life. She leaned on her family for human contact, followed her parents on vacations, marked off her calendar until holidays. Then came the end of a long shift marred by a stupid accident. A young man on a bachelor party weekend had wandered out behind a barbecue place and fallen into the river. That was it, he just fell. It was enough. He drowned but didn’t go far, got snagged on a tree branch right there while his friends inside had not a clue. Everything he ever thought he was, gone, no getting it back. She’d had flashes of her own dead boyfriend, knocked into someone’s backyard and out of existence by the train up north. Her shift partner had found her hiding in the trees, sobbing. He palmed her a hydro pill, telling her it’d feel just like Saturday night. She knew that. She took it, and many more in the months that followed before she was caught, suspended from work, and brought home by Willard.
“It felt safe here in Holebrook,” she said. “Simple. You understand, I’ve been to college in Vermont, a year in France, bare-boating in the Caribbean. I’ve been to Vietnam, Ireland. My dad worked but my mother’s people started out well off. I was eight before I understood that not everybody’s grandparents have a huge old house on the hill with a swimming pool and a home theater. My mother, I think she feels a little lost out here, she put pressure on me to belong to the other world. But I grew up in Fitzmorris. I tried for so long to find out, to feel right anywhere. In the end I had to decide on one place and one person to be. That’s what I mean: simple.”
“I never had a choice,” I said. “I only had the one place to go.” I told her about Polly; our chance meeting, our courtship, our marriage. How she got sick and how it was too late for her to get well. How bad I felt that I hadn’t seen it, and how much I wanted to go back in time and give her more life, even if it was without me. I’d been heartbroken, near-dead; no way I could live out there alone without her. I had taken my shot at life, and had returned to Wild Thyme to become the nothing I already was. Julie did me the favor of listening without trying to say the right thing.
“What do you most miss about her?”
“Possibility,” I said, after some thought. “Adventure. Bending the world to my will. The older I get, the more I see fate in the corner of my eye, lurking. When Poll was healthy, in her prime, she went toe-to-toe against fate, her and me. She was my moonlit mountains way out West, and I was her something, I guess. It was early love, before you see that it takes work. You’d follow that early love anywhere.”
“I know what you mean,” she said.
“It’s still early for you,” I said.
“Don’t pull that shit, man,” she said. “If you don’t like me, if you don’t see it, just say so. It’s easier in the end. Or if you do . . .”
“Of course I see it,” I said. Once spoken, the words showed me what we would become. And even through a painkiller drip of booze, it made me so sorrowful for my wife, so guilty. I knew I’d have to talk to her, but for the first time in memory I thought: What if I just leave it until tomorrow.
Miss Julie Meagher, alive and there in the bar with me, said, “Good enough.” We locked faces like drunk people do, like learning to swim, while the bartender gazed mournfully at the muted TV. “One thing,” she said, pulling away. “What’s Liz to you?”
“Liz Brennan?” I said stupidly. “She’s a friend. My best, her and Ed.”
“Right.” She stared at me, and I willed myself not to look away. “You don’t,” she said, “mess around with married women, do you?”
“Where’d you get that?”
“Do you?”
“No. Especially not . . . Liz. No.” If there was ever a time to come clean about Shelly, it would’ve been then, but there was something about her that I wanted to keep for myself. The lie had gotten easy. I’d need it to be true now.
“Okay, okay.” Julie looked into my eyes. “There is one thing you need to promise me before I set foot in that house again. And I don’t want you to get the wrong idea: it’s for your own
good.”
WE RENTED a dumpster, got cardboard boxes from the supermarket, and opened all the windows at Aunt Medbh’s. Out went the sofa bed that had wasted away to a skin of cloth over metal bones. And it went in pieces, as the thing had come with the house and I had no idea how it had gotten inside in the first place. Tucked in its folds were mouse droppings that I hid from Julie. Out went the brown hook rug of the living room floor. As it flew out the window and through the sunlight, it unfurled one last time to show the portrait of a dog I never knew, then whumped into the dumpster, gone.
All that May, between our jobs and my evenings working with Ed’s crew, Julie and I scrubbed the house’s interior, scraped the trim outside with an eye toward painting it lavender, and generally made the place shine.
Julie favored direct sunlight and plain things, and slowly I bought cheap and used furniture at her direction. I didn’t actually care except that I wanted it to feel like a home. And it did, when our days were done and we couldn’t possibly do more, when the night drifted in and we sat reading or talking nonsense, moths tapping against our windows, me with a sweating IPA and she with her glass of rosé wine. One time we had Ralph Lilly over to burn sage in the corners and chant.
DAYS, I went on patrol. The thunderstorms and cool rain of late spring gave way to the low drone of a heat wave. It broke records. As the ditches dried up, frogs braved the roads to look for new homes. Cars flattened them and they baked into paper, too empty for crows to pick at. The heat drew cottagers to the lakes and bars, but also turned the lake water warm as a bath. I patrolled with my truck’s windows down, stayed away from the station, and let everybody try to cool off according to their own lights.
Over the past year I’d had visits from Penny’s family, as well as the odd telephone call from Kevin. Once I’d gotten word from a state police lieutenant assigned to Troop P, saying he’d been calling his office too. The calls eventually stopped.
I took a quick turn up the driveway to the empty patch where the trailer once stood, still thrumming with vibrations, then back down to the station to stow my gun belt and change for a couple hours’ work with Ed’s crew. As the birds settled down and the mosquitoes took flight, he and I sat smoking weed together on the purlin plate of a half-dismantled barn.
“Did I tell you I heard from Kev? O’Keeffe,” Ed told me.
“Lucky you.”
“He made mistakes. You can let a man fall, or not.” It sounded like an argument he’d made before, probably to Liz. “He wrote me letters, called. Usually I wasn’t there for the phone, even if I was home. Anyway, he’s getting out.”
On paper, O’Keeffe had pled only to the burglary. Not that that would matter: in peoples’ minds, what he was convicted for paled in comparison with what he wasn’t. “And you’re giving him a reason to come back.”
“He didn’t kill his girl, you know.” Ed passed the pipe to me. “I don’t believe it, whatever they say. We don’t know if she’s even dead. She could be just . . . gone.”
“She’s more than gone. She’s got to be.” I shook my head. “And I might add that simply not killing your girlfriend is a low standard to meet. Possibly the lowest.”
“He asked for my trust.”
“Does he know I’m working for you, too?”
“Well, since you’re not a hard-on, you two’ll get along fine.” Ed puffed his pipe in contemplation. “You can let a man fall, or not.”
SOME NIGHTS I feel I am not paid enough to sleep with my scanner on, and don’t. Many local people know my landline and will just call. I was asleep when, around twelve-thirty a.m., my telephone rang. I thumped downstairs to answer it. The woman on the other end had to yell over a crowd; it was Connie Conley, who often tended bar at the High-Thyme Tavern.
“Henry,” she yelled. “I need you. Can you come?”
I rubbed my eyes. “What’s the problem?”
“We’ve got a fight about to go off.”
“Can’t you just buy a round? Kick them out, I don’t know.”
“They been kicked out. It’s to where they could get hurt.”
“Who is it?”
“Kevin O’Keeffe, himself.”
“Already?”
“You should know, dipshit!”
“On my way.” I pulled on a wrinkled uniform and kissed Julie on the top of the head. Deciding I didn’t have time to get a vest and service weapon from the station, I thumbed four shells into my own shotgun and drove into the night.
It being a weekend, the High-Thyme’s dirt lot was full. I heard the fight before I saw it. Around the corner, a man staggered in the open. It was O’Keeffe, almost unrecognizable. His bare torso was now clenched as tree roots, nothing extra save a circle of loose flesh on his waistline, some tattoos and scars. A stream of blood flowed from his scalp down his face and into a long brown beard. He held a hand over his forehead and one eye.
A man charged out of the darkness, made a swipe at O’Keeffe’s knee with a metal bar, and missed. O’Keeffe caught a blow on his shoulder, seized the other man’s wrist, and pounded him into the dirt, knocked out. It took just an instant, neat and quiet. A woman in the crowd screamed. O’Keeffe yanked his attacker up by one limp arm, at the same time keeping a foot on his neck. The next instant he’d be broken.
I fired my shotgun into a horseshoe pit, sending a cloud of sand into the night air. The report startled O’Keeffe into stillness. He didn’t turn at first. Likely he thought I was another one come to finish him off. When he did look, what he saw didn’t calm him down.
“O’Keeffe,” said I, “drop him down. Let him go.”
He looked away and nodded his head. He tensed his shoulders and pulled on the arm, and the woman in the crowd cried out again. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her struggle; someone was holding her.
“O’Keeffe,” I said, and racked a shell.
He dropped the man’s arm, kicked him lightly in the head, walked to a nearby pickup, dropped the tailgate, and sat. “Jesus,” I heard someone say. “Jesus Christ.”
A rail-thin middle-aged woman with long platinum hair escaped the crowd. She stumbled forward and knelt at the man’s side. In the darkness, the stars-and-bars on her black T-shirt glowed. She wore a pink baseball cap.
“Where is she, motherfucker?” she called around me to O’Keeffe. “You hear me? What’d you do with her?” This she repeated several times. She took a step back and looked up me. “Oh, look, it’s the cops to save the day. Where were you when she needed you?” She burst into choking sobs. Rianne Pellings, Penelope’s sister.
“Go back inside,” I said.
She pointed to the man. “He’s my cousin. Until somebody comes to care for him, I’m not going nowhere.”
I looked down at the cue-bald, gym-built man on the ground, and saw it was indeed Bobby Chase. He began to stir. She brushed his hair with her hand, and rose now and then to curse in O’Keeffe’s direction. In response, Kevin began to mumble in a weary voice. He sounded sad, and I knew how he felt. Nothing ever gets done with a fight. If a fight leaves you through fighting, it simply goes somewhere else. And it’ll probably come back too.
I walked to where Chase lay. Rianne knelt, peering into his face and telling him to wake up. I squatted down and placed a hand on her shoulder. I was close enough to catch the scent of shampoo and sweat.
“He going to live?”
“He’s breathing.”
I stood and scanned the crowd and saw angry faces. Recognizing a member of the VFC, I gestured to him to call for an ambulance. He trotted to the bar.
“Rianne, things are going to get . . . I’m taking O’Keeffe away.” I moved my head in Kevin’s direction. “He’ll answer for anything he ought to. If you all want to press charges, if there are charges to press, we’ll talk.”
She turned away. “Just take him while you can.”
I stood. “And tell him when he can listen,” I said, meaning Chase. “I don’t know anything and that works both ways. Tell him don’t go now
here or I’ll call Binghamton.”
“I don’t tell him what to do. Neither do you.”
At some remove sat Kevin O’Keeffe, still muttering.
“Let’s see that eye,” I said, approaching slowly.
He looked me up and down, then dropped his hand. The blood on his face came from a lump on his head, bisected by an open seam, as well as a tear in the flesh above his left eye, which had swollen shut. “How’s it look?” he asked.
“How’d it happen?”
“A rock.”
“Been there. Give me the alphabet backwards.”
He did, slower than I liked, correcting himself twice. I heard the ambulance’s wail in the distance.
“Okay, get in the truck, we’re leaving.”
“I’m getting in your truck?”
“That’s right.”
“I don’t think so.”
“No?”
“I’m fine.”
“Kev. I could let someone else handle this.”
He looked down at the blood on his hand, some of it his, some not, and up at me, pushed himself off of his perch, and stood. He walked over to a rusted compact car—Penny’s—and locked it.
We hopped in my truck and drove away. As we moved through the darkness, I considered what to do with the ex-con. “There’s a first-aid kit under your seat,” I told him. “Patch up your eye, at least.”
He rummaged underneath him, found the white plastic box, yanked the rearview in his direction, and began to tape gauze over his eye.
“What happened?” I asked him.
“Huh?”
“How’d it start?”
“Are you asking as a friend?”
“Talk, and maybe I won’t call your PO.”
“Well, I didn’t start it.” He tore off a piece of medical tape with his teeth. “Not any of it. I’m sitting there at the bar, next I know I’m called outside. I can take a punch or two. Nothing like prison for that. But them two weren’t going to let it go.”
“So?”
“So what am I supposed to do, let him kill me? It ain’t time yet. I fought back. You saw.”
“I saw something. So he just started swinging. You didn’t say anything, they didn’t want anything.”