Blue Stew (Second Edition)

by Woodland, Nathaniel

  Nigel was arranging chips and veggies and dip on the coffee table and Jamie was sorting through a stack of board games when there came a quick knock on the door. Walter, washing late-lunch dishes in the kitchen, slipped into the living room at the same time as Henry.

  Pulling off his cardigan jacket, Henry asked, “Who else is here? Who’s yellow VW is that?”

  Nigel pointed at Walter. Henry’s neat black beard lifted as he smiled at him.

  “Yep,” said Walter. “I’m mobile again. I got one that doesn’t break down if you drive it through a puddle, too.”

  • • •

  Throughout the evening, mention of Victim Number Two was kept to a minimum, likely because everyone privately felt that it was Walter’s place go there or not go there as he chose. The amazing and surprising nature of his story was agreed upon initially, but because Walter remained conspicuously mute on the matter, it was soon dropped and never retrieved.

  Otherwise, it was another happy evening with friends, and a more prolonged one this time, too, for Walter no longer harbored discolored spots in his life that required immediate tending.

  At any rate, there was nothing he could tend to that night.

  Jamie Astley was a pretty shapeless girl, but, in spite of this, throughout the evening Walter had trouble keeping his eyes from falling on certain parts of her skinny body, especially whenever he caught her leaning over to move her piece on the board or to grab a snack. Every time, the lust mingled with guilt, for Nigel was such a great friend. Then, at some point midway through the night, all this fell away in place of a powerful new insight: like it or not, he was behaving like a normal guy.

  Soon after this, Walter recognized that the short bursts of elation for stray bits of life—which he’d been experiencing throughout the day yesterday—had more or less leveled out that day. Now, instead, there were growing stretches in which he simply felt normal.

  • • •

  Chewing greedy spoonfuls of Cheerios, tired eyes glued to the TV set, Walter breakfasted alone on his sofa the next morning. If anyone had asked, it would’ve taken him a second to say what he was eating or what he was watching.

  His mind was already lost in his plans for the day.

  Lunch was best, he’d gotten that far already. Dinner was a little too forward—and a little too far away, to be honest—and, it being a Sunday, he wasn’t sure if she would be at Church that morning, or, alternately, how late she might sleep in. So brunch was out, too.

  Yes, he would ask Maddie Wendell out to lunch that day. It was a nice, neutral meal. Plus, from the warm morning glow creeping over the land beyond his house, it looked like it was shaping up to be a crisp, attractive late-fall day in Sutherland, Vermont.

  Walter was now contemplating what he might say to her over the phone; how exactly he might approach the lunch proposal. He was finding that the more time he spent phrasing and rephrasing the words in his head, the stiffer and more robotic the words seemed to become. As hard as it was with nothing else to do but let the hours pass by, he decided to just put it out of his mind—don’t over think it, as they say.

  When he finished his breakfast, Walter retrieved a rag and some new all-purpose cleaner and set about attacking the food-stains on the carpet of his otherwise clean living room. He knew it was futile—the forty-odd minutes he’d spent on them two nights ago had fast hit a wall beyond which there had been no improvement—but he also knew that it would consume him and annoy him to no end, too.

  By ten-thirty his hands were pale and pruned and his head ached from the citrus smell of the cleaning product. The stains were all wet and all present.

  Finally he slammed the floor with a closed-fist, “God damn-it!”

  Then he laughed at himself and got up and washed his hands.

  Nauseatingly thirsty for fresh air, he made for the hallway, where he was then struck by a much better idea than just sticking his head outside. He grabbed his coat and hat, confirmed that the new key was fastened to his keychain, and then opened the door.

  The yellow VW could not have appeared more modest, the tiny little thing. It had been manufactured in the early nineties, and it showed the wear of a car that’d spent two long decades suffering through New England weather and New England roads. The paint was faded and rust crept up from the undercarriage—as though the yellow frame had been dipped in mud—and there were dents in the body and scrapes in the windshield that had thwarted the dealership’s half-hearted patch-up efforts.

  A small swelling of pride filled Walter as he stepped outside and looked at his new vehicle in the morning light. It was his; he owned it. He earned it. The proud, selfish happiness compelled him with an urge to buy more material goods for himself.

  Unfortunately, he had emptied his bank account on the car yesterday. The shopping spree would have to wait until he got his insurance money back, at least.

  Walter got into the car and fired it up. He eased on the gas with no clear goal in mind: just a careless joyride on a nice autumn day.

  Ambling along a road that spanned the major stretch from his home to the center of town, Walter spent as much time looking out of his side windows as he did his forward windshield. The last of the leaves were clinging hopelessly to the naked, cold trees covering Sutherland. Tall grass around the crop fields and hayfields he passed were bent over submissively, frostbit from the last few frozen nights.

  A ruined beaver pond now shifted by on his left. Walter remembered that the dam had been torn down after a makeshift committee had decided that the water was getting too close to the road. Now water remained only in a handful of swampy puddles littered with fallen trees and brown stumps. Ice had crept over most of it, moving outwards from the banks.

  Winter was closing in, there was no doubt.

  Rather than what might’ve happened a week ago, with his mind reflecting off of this acknowledgement and falling straight to the dark, short days of a long, cold winter, Walter’s first thoughts were of the annual first day of heavy snow. He thought of how it would cover the trees and the land in a clean and white new outfit, and, with all the schools closed, he thought of the crowds of elated children who would drag their sleds to the long, slopping hill at the foot of Morris’ cucumber lot. Walter thought about the Christmas tree they would light at the center of town, and of the families who’d always go out of their ways to present their own festive front yard displays.

  Walter decided that he would buy some Christmas lights that year. And a sled, for certain.

  Operating purely on light whims, Walter turned up the intersecting street that would take him past Nigel’s house. Beyond that was Kall’s store. Maybe he would pay Kall a visit? Or, maybe he wouldn’t: he had no reason to plan that far ahead, as pleasant as he was finding the present aimlessness to be.

  Some minutes later he motored uphill past Nigel’s place. He saw Nigel’s car in the driveway so he gave a passing toot on the horn.

  Seconds later, a grey tabby cat sprung across the road and scampered up Doris Hanes’s steep dirt driveway. Walter wondered if it was one of Doris’s cats—did that mean she was home? The last time Henry had driven Walter to work, he had mentioned—as they’d passed—that he’d heard that Doris was still seeing a psychiatrist intensively and that she was refusing to return home.

  Walter—now beyond the driveway and nearing the ridge of the small valley—sincerely hoped that Doris had found the courage to rid the house of whatever demons had entered the place that dreadful night. It was a lovely house. The natural, open aesthetics were very appealing to Walter, and the view from the porch was beautiful. The kitchen probably needed to be re-floored, though . . .

  Driving along the same ridge that, farther along, Kall’s Tractor Supply resided on, a road sign appeared ahead on the left that Walter, with his mind so far adrift, hadn’t anticipated. Brown Hill Road, it said. It was the road Maddie lived on. His mind didn’t make it beyond this simple acknowledgement; he just pressed the brakes and turned the wheel.

>   Brown Hill Road was an old gravel road that sloped gently downhill. The land that surrounded this stretch of the road was dryer and rockier than most of Sutherland: rugged bushes, brambles, and patches of exposed bedrock took the place of the area’s typical forests.

  Walter had a funny idea, then, that he might end up spending a lot of time in his future cruising in his new car down this very road, if he played his cards right that day. His stomach twisted into a knot at the thought.

  Walter discovered that it was obvious, once he actually considered what he was doing, that he was just going to drive past the Wendell farmhouse. It opened him up to too many chances for an awkward first encounter, trying to track Maddie down on what he knew to be such a large property—especially when the day was still in its morning hours.

  A mile on, the road began to slope back uphill, and the forest to his right—which had filled out again near the bottom of the hill—cut starkly away to wide-open grazing land, separated from the road by a stone wall and some low barbed-wire fencing. Walter didn’t see any of their cows, though he knew that the Wendell’s owned quite a few.

  Looking back to the road, Walter gasped and nearly slammed the brakes, but he stopped himself in time. It was too late. She had seen him before he had seen her.

  Not far up the road, Madeline Wendell was pulling a cart in the same direction he was driving. Walter surely would’ve admired how her butt creased pleasantly inside her tight, dirty jeans as she twisted her body around, if it wasn’t for the fact that she had twisted her body around in order to look directly at him.

  Walter allowed the hill to slow his car to a crawl as he froze like a deer in headlights. His mouth went dry. And then Maddie moved her cart off the road, and Walter snapped out of it, and all he could think to do was laugh and shake his head.

  “Nice going, dipshit,” he muttered to himself.

  Maybe she hadn’t recognized him in his new car and he could’ve kept motoring past unidentified—but Walter saw no good reason to risk being so rude if she had recognized him. He accelerated carefully up beside Maddie and put down the passenger window.

  “Walter?” Maddie leaned her head to one side in order to look through the window. Her unkempt hair fell across part of her face.

  “Hi Maddie,” Walter was relieved to hear how calm he sounded as he brought his car to a halt. “What’cha got there?”

  Maddie looked about, appearing flustered, before noticing her cart, “Oh. Cow poop.”

  She laughed, and Walter couldn’t contain the big smile that took hold of his face.

  “You’re not coming all the way from Kall’s, are you?”

  “No. I just like to take poop for a walk up and down the road sometimes.”

  Walter’s mouth flapped as he tried to think of something smart to say to that.

  “Our truck’s in the shop,” Maddie now explained with a shrug.

  “Damn. That’s a long haul with so much manure.”

  “I’m passionate about my poop, I guess.”

  Some combination of her soft, confident voice, her sweet, understated grin, and how much she evidently enjoyed the word “poop” was enough to make Walter decide, right then, that he probably should marry this girl.

  “But, hey, what are we doing talking about poop?” Maddie’s pitch rose to an enthusiastic level, “I’m talking to Sutherland’s elusive new celebrity, aren’t I!”

  “Elusive?”

  “That’s what Channel 8 called you this morning.”

  Walter laughed, “I guess I have been ignoring their calls . . .”

  “Have you been watching much of the recent coverage?”

  “No, actually.”

  “Really? Well, I saw your picture on the news last night above the caption, ‘Walter Boyd, Reluctant Hero.’”

  “‘Hero’?” Walter scoffed. “No, if I was a hero, I would’ve tackled the scrawny twig of a man and wrestled the rifle out of his hands, instead of fleeing like a wuss. Then we wouldn’t have a dangerous psychopath running loose right now . . .”

  Walter had simply been trying to sound modest. He actually hadn’t thought about it until now, after he’d said it. He definitely could have rushed Timothy Glass in the dark and stood a very good chance of disarming the bony, pale shadow of a man. A small seed of guilt took root then—what if Timothy went on to instigate more atrocities?

  Maddie, however, only saw it as it had been intended: modesty for modesty’s sake.

  “Shut-up and stop being so charmingly modest. Braylen Taylor told your story for you, buddy. He said you defied Timothy at gunpoint, dove across the room to cut the power, and then dodged gunfire to escape. If it wasn’t for you, Timothy would still be hard at work stewing up more of that horrible stuff!”

  Being called “charming” slowed the growth of the seedling of guilt and regret, certainly.

  “Yeah,” he drawled. It was true what she said. He even knew it, too. But still, “I could’ve definitely taken the fucker down after I cut the lights . . .”

  “Well, I could’ve definitely gone to his house a month ago and hit him across the face with a shovel, too.” As cold as it was outside, Maddie now stopped to wipe a line of sweat from her slight, rounded nose. “Don’t play games with hindsight, Walter. No one ever wins.”

  Walter grinned, nodding, “You’re right.”

  Unfortunately, knowing what’s right and acting on what’s right had long been separate things for Walter.

  A gust of wind whipped up suddenly, the type of gust you see most often late in the fall, when there are no leaves to keep the cold wind in check and soften its bite. Maddie’s blonde hair flailed wildly for a moment, then came to rest around her head all twisted and frizzed.

  She didn’t attempt to fix her hair. Something about this was so refreshing to Walter: she seemed so comfortable and at-ease in her world.

  “So what are you doing in my neck of the woods, anyways?”

  And there it was. Walter wasn’t sure how they’d gotten so far without coming to it.

  He could easily say that he was out driving his new car around town on a lovely Sunday morning just for the heck of it, and then segue into a casual proposition for lunch from there. That had been the general idea in his head when he had first pulled up beside her, actually. But, after this short period in her presence, Walter now felt that that would be too casual and natural. He wanted to make his feelings more transparent; he felt really bad about blowing her off before.

  “Maybe I came to see you?”

  Maddie raised an eyebrow, “Well, either you did or you didn’t.” But, Walter felt sure he saw something light up in her eyes.

  “You know, I hate to be a walking cliché,”—Walter felt his face begin to warm as he spoke; hadn’t he decided that this would be easy?—“but after going through all that . . . what do they say? Oh: It scared me straight. It took me back and made me reevaluated my priorities and blah-blah . . .” Who says “blah-blah” in actual conversation? Walter knew his face must be deepening in hue, but he powered on, “It helped me see what I really want to get out of life. Maddie—you were the first person I thought of when I got away safely that night. I want the companionship of a smart, strong, beautiful girl like you.”

  Walter thought his cheeks might burn clean off his face, now. Did he really just say all that out loud?

  Maddie seemed to be at a loss for words . . . but . . . was that the cold wind making her eyes water?

  “Maddie,” Walter laughed stiffly, “want to go somewhere for lunch today?”

  “Walter,” her soft voice was interrupted by another, smaller, burst of wind. “Walter, did you know I had the biggest crush on you in high school?”

  “No . . . really?”

  “C’mon . . . we all did. You were the hot hockey jock . . .”

  Walter shook his head, “That was a lifetime ago . . .”

  “You’re still a young guy, Walter.”

  “I guess . . .” Walter was growing very uneasy. She seemed
to be avoiding his question.

  “Walter,” Maddie started again. That gentle voice had the power to kill him right then, Walter suddenly realized. “I think I still have a crush on you. Every time I would go around back at Kall’s . . . when I saw you, I’d feel like I was in high school again, watching your games . . . the butterflies . . . and you still didn’t really seem to know I was there . . .”

  “I’m sorry,” said Walter with emphatic sincerity, “but maybe I wasn’t there . . . I’m here now.”

  “That’s a good line,” Maddie smiled, and Walter melted. “You know the thing they say about farmer-types? We’re hardheaded. We get stuck on ideas and can’t be persuaded otherwise, even after so much time . . . and even if the ideas start to seem . . . less perfect.”

  Walter swallowed, “I know. I’m no heart-throb hockey jock anymore . . .”

  “Well, maybe I’m too stubborn to care,” said Maddie. “Yes, Walter, I would love to get lunch with you today.”

  Walter was certain that whatever feeling of perfect bliss victims one through five felt while on the Blue Stew could not have matched this. He didn’t respond, not beyond the giant, goofy grin now stretching his face apart.

  “Although, do we have to wait for lunch? I’m pretty hungry now . . . how about brunch?”

  Walter stammered, “Yeah. Yeah. Sure! What . . . um . . . so do you need to drag this cart back to your house? I can get out and help,” Walter put a hand on his seatbelt buckle.

  “No, no. Do you . . . do you mind that I’m a filthy mess right now?”

  “No.”

  “Then let’s just go now! The Silver Tap Sugar Shack is still open,” she said as she opened the passenger door. Gesturing at the cart she’d just ditched, “I can deal with that later. It’s all bullshit anyways.”