by Tom Bouman
As I neared the Swales place, I could see Sage Buckles’s sedan parked in the driveway with the trunk open. I saw Kevin O’Keeffe standing beside Buckles in the space where the trailer had been. One of Buckles’s legs was loose at the knee and could hold no weight, and his wrists were fastened behind him with wire. His hands were purple. I stopped my truck in the middle of the road and got out with the shotgun in my hand. Kevin knocked Buckles to his good knee and raised a machete over the back of his neck. In his other hand was an automatic pistol, which he pointed dead at me.
“Kevin,” I said.
“Do you want to live?”
“Yes,” murmured Buckles. His face was white, his nose was flattened completely to one side, and black blood dripped from his chin.
“Not you.” Kevin never took his eyes off me. I laid the shotgun down. “‘Ahead of you are butchers and killers to drag you along,’” he told Buckles, tapping the back of his head with the blade. “You a butcher? That’s how she’d see it. You’re a demon. But you know what? So are we, all of us. And we’re going to become something else now. We’re all going to become something else.”
“No,” said Buckles. Tears streamed down his face.
“This is important,” Kevin said. He gestured for me to move forward, and I did, away from my weapon. I kept my hands on the back of my head. He smiled at me, a lucid, happy smile. “You feel her here?”
“Sometimes,” I said.
“We need to help her leave.”
“Kev. I know who killed her,” I said.
“That makes two of us.”
“You don’t know everything.”
“I saw a name in your file. I saw this name, Hope Martinek. She was this guy’s wife, so-called? But I didn’t know any Hope. I never seen her before. So when I got out and tried to put my shit together, put that night together, she was a missing piece. Maybe she saw something I didn’t.” Kevin took a casual step on Buckles’s bad leg. Buckles let out a scream that circled back into tears. I took a step forward.
“Stop crying,” Kevin said, “just fuckin stop it.” He turned back to me. “Hope Martinek. I checked her addresses, I checked the rehab. But I couldn’t find her any of those places. Why is that, Sage?”
Buckles didn’t reply.
“What did Hope know?”
“I didn’t kill her,” Sage managed, his voice thick, his eyes unfocused. “She got drunk and shot up. It was too much; she died.”
I took another step.
“Henry, I’ll kill you right now,” Kevin said. I stopped and held my hands up. “It didn’t take five minutes to check her record. Hope was on three months’ house arrest and outpatient with a fuckin bracelet. Until June last year. She completed. So how’d she get up here in May? I didn’t see her then. Nobody fuckin saw her. So why did Sage say she was with him all that time? He killed Penny. Hope knew. So he killed her too.”
“Okay, man,” I said. “It doesn’t have to be that way.” But I was not so sure.
“Here’s what we say: Om mani padme hum. Om mani padme hum. Repeat it.”
I repeated it. Buckles tried and didn’t quite get there. “Oh, no, oh, no,” he said.
“Here’s why it’s important to say the words,” said Kevin. “You killed my girl. She wasn’t ready to die. And she didn’t die easy, did she?”
“I didn’t kill her,” Sage choked out. “You going to shoot this cop, too?”
“You put Coleman Tod right next to her while you dragged me through that fuckin lake house job. Nobody would’ve got through me otherwise.”
“You think you could protect her? She was going to die for one thing or another. She was already gone.”
“No.”
“She ran her mouth,” the big man said. “She ran her mouth and got a talking-to. You want to say I killed her. She was already laid out dead in my fuckin house when I got back. By that fuckin devil. He left me to deal with her.”
“You thought you’d get to have your way first.” Kevin stepped on the leg once more. “Right now, where Penny is? She’s not where you put her. She’s with the terrors in between. Do you know what she sees? Charred stumps, black spots, dark ravines, and shadows. And you’re with her too. We all are. Om mani padme hum. Do you know what the words do, Sage? The words dissolve that place—the earth where Penny is—into water, the water into fire, the fire into fireflies, into wind. The candle’s flame into wind.”
“All right,” said Buckles.
“The wind into consciousness, consciousness to luminance, luminance into radiance, radiance to imminence, and imminence into what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Clear light,” Kevin said. “Let’s try again.”
We tried again. My mind raced. I said the words but did not mean them. Buckles couldn’t get them right and gave voice only to his pain.
“It’s all right,” said Kevin, not unkindly, and pressed the pistol to Buckles’s head. I started for my weapon but an unseen hand stopped me. The hand was the sound of a shot. Its echo went on and on. Kevin watched me sink to my knees, then to my side on the ground. Then he shot Buckles clean through the head. I tried to move and a fire ripped through my shoulder to the shredded flesh above my heart.
I didn’t want to die. But if I was going to, I might as well get into the spirit of it. Penny came to me. Wherever she was, she was still beautiful. I thought of her as the same as myself, and as Kevin, and Shelly, and Julie, and dead faceless Coleman Tod, and Dopey Hopey, and even dead Buckles right there with his mind spread out over the unmowed grass like vomit, and as the bobolinks in the field, and the field itself and everything in it, and the forest at the edge of the field that grew on and on, and as every great old tree in the commonwealth. And, though it took some effort, I saw her as my own Polly.
With my lips not quite touching Penelope Pellings’s ear, I began to chant. Kevin listened, smiled, and spoke words out of a dream. Strange and familiar, his words, though I can’t remember them now.
PART THREE
I SAT ON a kitchen chair under a maple tree with leaves the color of cherry bubble gum. Where I pressed the fiddle to my shoulder, the place felt foreign, still raw: muscle healing around a through-and-through gunshot. A gang of antibiotics for the wound, a valve for a collapsed lung, and bracing for a collarbone fracture. Two weeks of PT and it was still going on. But the fiddle came alive as I drew a bow across the strings. While I watched from the shade of my tree, folks swarmed the Meaghers’ hilltop to see the barn-raising and maybe swing a hammer or haul on a rope. Ed had told me that my job was to set a steady pace. I let the bow take over and it veered into “Ways of the World.”
Since early morning, they’d knocked the sill beams together, put up corner posts and plates, and with the aid of two real draft horses and a pulley system had gotten a start on the second-story bents. The building’s ribs called to mind a cathedral when you look up inside it and imagine climbing to the ceiling, or at least a church of some grandness.
Holding the fiddle’s neck with my left hand, something as natural as walking to me, had changed. Without the sling, my torn muscles worked, and after a few numbers an ache drew my attention, every now and then a twitch.
With the second-story plates joined to the bents, it’d be time to send up the rafters on either side to meet the frame and be attached with pins of yellow locust.
They tell me Andy Swales called for help and watched Kevin as he sat beside me cross-legged and silent. Kev tossed the 9mm in the driveway where all could see, but still they tackled him when he wouldn’t lie flat. I guess he’s in the lotus position still, somewhere in the belly of SCI Waynesburg, waiting for his date. Whatever he needed to do out here, he did it, and pled to it. Even to Charles Michael Heffernan, once they matched the gun up.
In the days that followed, Sleight’s and Dally’s people combed Sage Buckles’s property and unearthed a blue plastic barrel. Inside, dirt and an entire skeleton, Penny Pellings’s. With my testimony and evidence from Cy St
okes and the truck, DA Ross was able to conclude that Coleman Tod had killed her and planted blood evidence in Kevin’s truck as insurance; the matter ended with a brief inquiry. The family took her remains and I don’t know what they did after that.
Wild Thymers drifted in and out of our work site, in and out of the life of a long-gone era we could only wonder at now. Willard Meagher bounced from one task to another, never quite in time to be helpful, always just in time to get in the way. Julie walked the upper tier of the frame, hauling timbers up as they were passed to her. I yawned, a great world-eating yawn, and I played.
I’D SPENT THE NIGHT before with Lieutenant Sleight. He had borrowed his wife’s car and, from Columbus Park up to Prospect Street, he drove us through downtown and its walking wounded. At a gas station on Clinton and Glenwood we stopped for beer. In the parking lot a tiny hatchback with tinted windows idled, pulsing with music. I walked into the store, chose a sixer of Flower Power, and waited to pay behind a young woman buying flavored cigars. She slipped into the hatchback, which stayed put as Sleight drove away.
We ended up in a lot kitty-corner to Stingy Jack’s, drinking beer from a six-pack turning warm. Above us, travelers sped to and fro on the overpass. When you watch a bar’s entrance long enough, the people seem to move in and out like air. Around eleven some angry lumps stepped out yelling, and we perked up in hopes of entertainment, but their shoving went nowhere. We called it a draw.
“I hear from Special Investigations that they’re looking at a new crew now,” Sleight told me. “You can’t keep up with it, not anymore.”
“A new crew.”
“Yeah,” he said. “A new old crew, maybe. Bunch of kids all grew up together on the same block downtown. Whatever stream Blaine was running has dried up.” At this I was downcast, but I hadn’t expected the world. “Too much mess up north and down your way. A dead cop and so on, that crew is scurrying for their holes. And Blaine, I’m sure he knows what’s good for him. Nobody’s seen him since fall last year.”
We’d sat long enough across from Stingy Jack’s in the car’s forced air, listening to right-wing talk radio, that we were out of beer and dry. We decided why not go in. It was a Friday, a loud, busy night, and my shoulder sling attracted no attention under my jacket. Sleight ordered a bourbon and I stuck to IPAs, and we stood and watched the girls behind the bar filling drinks in constant motion. When Sleight leaned over the bar to ask one a question, I couldn’t hear what either of them said, but the lieutenant nodded and we left soon after.
“She thinks Ohio,” he said as we got back in his wife’s car. “He can run, but who owns the place, owns the place.”
“And who’s that?”
“Same folks that bought the apartments where Heffernan got shot,” he said. “They’re registered in Pennsylvania; I looked it up.” He scribbled something on a Post-it and handed it to me. I was not surprised: on the paper was written, Ton L, LLC, with a Scranton address. “You know who the managing director is. The members aren’t on the certificate, don’t have to be. You could try to get to them with a subpoena if you could work it up. Blaine isn’t connected that I can tell, not on paper, except for the bar and the house in Airy. The group also owns that, or used to. They’d paid some property taxes on it, sold it to a bigger investment group that looks legitimate. I wouldn’t be surprised if the next we heard, Blaine was dead or back in prison. Henry, even if they knew, they won’t have touched any of Blaine’s business directly,” he said. “Not Swales, not nobody. That’s what they had Blaine for.”
“And Blaine had who he had.” All down the line to Penny Pellings. Who’s been here since I’ve been gone, pretty little girl with the red dress on.
“Anyway,” Sleight said. “I’ve got my mess. You’ve got yours.”
RALPH LILLY arrived with the first chill in the afternoon air and joined me under the tree to swat at his wooden box. Liz brought out the banjo, and we competed with noise from the raising. After a couple tunes I let them two hold it down, slipped into the tree line to toughen up, and then circled the structure and stretched my legs. Next week would be next week. Was it a shame what happened to people, of course it was. You can mourn it without end or deal with it the best you can. The setting sun broke up among the trees and timbers and shot wild pink beams across the field. The crew hammered decking across the rafters. Miss Julie appeared beside me, catching her breath and sweating out her troubles, almost as if she had always been there.
WORKING ON A BUILDING
Emily Bouman, Barbara Jean Bouman, Pete and Kate Bouman, Joyce Wilbur and Ed John, and my whole family. Neil Olson at Donadio & Olson. Tom Mayer, Sarah Bolling, Elisabeth Kerr, Mary Kate Skehan, Sam Mitchell, Meredith McGinniss, Steve Colca, Don Rifkin, Julia Druskin, Bill Rusin, Brendan Curry, Golda Rademacher, Deirdre Dolan, Dan Christiaens, Karen Rice, and W. W. Norton & Company. Angus Cargill, Sophie Portas, and Faber & Faber UK. Adrienne Brodeur, Isa Catto, Daniel Shaw, and Aspen Words for the space and time in Woody Creek. Judi Farkas at Judi Farkas Management. Dave Cole for his sensitive copyediting. Jennifer Widman at the South Dakota Festival of Books. Chad Buckley and Tim Burgh provided background on law enforcement; any errors are mine alone. Carolyn Finch, Sue Millard, Peg Miller, and the Silver Lake Volunteer Fire Company and Rescue Squad. Professors Butler, Gildin, Pearson, and Skladany of the Dickinson School of Law at Penn State, and the staff of the H. Laddie Montague, Jr., Law Library. Bill Cokely, for the OJT, in memory. Dante Di Stefano, Peter Fallon, Bill Luce, John McNamara, and Nick Mullen.
SELECTED WORKS CONSULTED
A History of Bluegrass in New York and Northeastern Pennsylvania by Ken Oakley and Carol Ripic; Celtic Folklore: Welsh and Manx, Volume One by John Rhys; Timber Frame Construction by Jack A. Sobon and Roger Schroeder; Historic American Timber Joinery by Jack A. Sobon; The Tibetan Book of the Dead translated by Robert A. F. Thurman; The Celtic Twilight by W. B. Yeats.
ALSO BY TOM BOUMAN
Dry Bones in the Valley
Copyright © 2017 by Tom Bouman
All rights reserved
First Edition
For information about permission to reproduce selections from
this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
For information about special discounts for bulk purchases,
please contact W. W. Norton Special Sales at
[email protected] or 800-233-4830
Book design by Brooke Koven
Production manager: Julia Druskin
JACKET DESIGN BY FORT
JACKET PHOTOGRAPH © JILL BATTAGLIA / TREVILLION IMAGES
ISBN 978-0-393-24964-4
ISBN 978-0-393-24965-1 (e-book)
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.,
15 Carlisle Street, London W1D 3BS