by David Downie
The only odd things I noticed while cleaning the shack after finishing the rebuild of the McCulloch is that the handsaw and the old chain for the chainsaw had disappeared. Searching nearby, I found a cigarette butt and compared it with the one Harvey flicked into the bushes the other night, when he almost set the garden on fire. Accidentally? I wonder. It was the same brand, but millions of tobacco addicts smoke that brand, and dozens of them unwittingly start wildfires by tossing lit butts out of their car windows or dropping them when hiking or camping.
Taz probably has the limb saw folded up in the pocket of his new overalls, bought for him by Beverley. I’ll have to ask. We’ve been pruning trees for the last few days. Why anyone would want the worn, filthy old chain from the McCulloch, however, I can’t imagine. It was too greasy for Taz to dream of touching it. Harvey or the Tom Cat and the forensic experts? That makes no sense. My guess is, Beverley threw it away with the other derelict items and trash when she whisked through the shack a few days ago. Again, I must remember to ask.
Little by little we are finding our footing. Maggie and I have adopted a piecemeal approach to catching up. We hold our parlays on the beach, at dawn, as she jogs slowly and I walk as fast as I can to stay by her side. She was the solitary runner, it turns out, the only other human form on the sand, the one I spotted several times. Now she’s my companion as I hike to Beverley’s in the morning. Then she doubles back and goes to city hall, afterward driving to the Beachcomber in time for lunch. I must stop calling it by that name. It’s now an upscale resort, with the most plentiful aquifer in the county, as Beverley has often reminded me. The water is sweet and good-tasting, better than anywhere around except up at Narrow Rocks. If she really wants to sell and get out, she should have no trouble.
So far, we have managed to organize three lunches together, two of them including Taz, and each more delicious and life enhancing than the preceding one. Beverley also excels at making fried artichokes in the Jewish style of the former ghetto of Rome, she says, and steak and kidney pie. Luckily, we did not tell Taz about the kidneys. He ate hearty. Watching the three of them interact is a joy. For some unknown reason, in Maggie’s presence, Beverley quiets down and sometimes hardly says a word. They are confidantes. That is clear. Sometimes I wonder if Beverley is in awe of her elegant, younger friend. Taz, too, behaves differently around Maggie, he’s less introverted and erratic, and he laughs from the heart. I’m beginning to think she has a similar, beneficial effect on me. The magical Glinda the Good?
The explanation may be simpler: We are happy in each other’s company. Happiness is a much-abused concept. The more you seek it, the more it evades you. That has been my experience. “For as long as it lasts,” were the famous words spoken by Napoleon Bonaparte’s mother, a realist, who happened to be Corsican, not French. “After us, the flood,” said Madame de Pompadour, half a century before her, expressing similar sentiments. Both were right. I’m not sure which phrase is more apt or topical, but, given the persistent drought here, I’d rather plump for Pompadour.
My diligence in keeping this journal has not been laudable. In plain English, I have been too busy and too ecstatic and too worried and too worn out emotionally and physically to sit down and write. Perhaps happiness is not conducive to good poetry, journal writing, or gumshoeing.
Finally, after having moved the RV to the mansion’s parking area, and also gotten beyond the sham of sleeping in the extra bedroom when Taz knew very well I was sleeping with his grandmother, and having opened a new bank account and paid for my own post office box, I am feeling the keel beginning to right itself.
Unbeknownst to others, I’ve also indulged in some amateur sleuthing. Yes, I am being facetious and must stop it: As an assistant DA, then lawyer and then judge who worked with professional investigators for three decades, I don’t have the luxury of pretending I’m a dilettante. Rather, I am a gelded, proscribed pariah. Anyone who helps me risks a backlash if discovered. Yet, in both San Antonio and Missoula, my old network appears to be coming through. That is the beauty of the great confraternity of women and men who believe in the law over all else: They are willing to put their lives in peril to uphold it, and assist their fellows. Those old enough to remember Operation Stay Behind during the Cold War will understand: The best way to resist is to stay behind, blend in and bide your time. I will say no more, other than to note that my research is ongoing.
On a hunch, thinking of what Beverley said when talking about Maggie and her elusive son, I went through the ABA directory online and found a colleague I vaguely knew decades ago, based in Montana. As discreetly as possible, I asked about recorded deaths of non-Caucasians on Native American lands during the various protest gatherings of recent decades—the kind of information that should be but isn’t readily available online.
In San Antonio, the question was, what chance is there of a record somewhere in the country or south of the border of an Indio woman presumably marrying a Caucasian American, though they may not actually have formalized their relationship, giving birth to a boy named Alexander, last name, like the father’s, presumably Hansen or Johnson, then dying suddenly, presumably fourteen to seventeen years ago, when the boy was too young to remember her, the death probably occurring in Montana during a pipeline protest? It’s a tall order, I realize, especially given the tensions in our official relations with so many foreign governments.
I will provide information to the investigators as it crops up, and they will report back through safe channels I cannot reveal, not even here. Neither Maggie nor Taz nor Beverley knows of this research. They think I am focused entirely on the garden of the Eden Resort, and my harebrained scheme to revive the salmon hatchery.
Taz and I planted several dozen buddleia cuttings around the house and in front of the big, old, ugly, white propane tank. It leaks and looks like an accident waiting to happen. I must get it replaced. To create the screen of shrubs, we moved the spare sandbags out of the way—Maggie got in a truckload of them when the house was propped up a few years back, and they’re all over the place, in the way. Overeager, Taz has been watering the cuttings several times a day, to the point that I am beginning to fear they will get root rot.
On another front, though it is probably a pipe dream of mine, Maggie is trying to find out, through city hall, whether the hatchery and surrounding land can be purchased from the county or state authorities—the current title is not clear. Soon we will hike to it and have a picnic there, even though Beverley says that’s not a good idea.
So, is my boat really righting?
What trouble me most are the cage and the bones, the razor wire and the helicopter, Beverley’s unlikely thesis, and Harvey’s near-psychotic behavior that afternoon at the motel. Before leaving, he took me aside and asked what Amy had died of, then he grunted and nodded and said, “Maddie probably cast a spell on her, she knew where you were, we all did, we just never thought you’d come back.”
Does he really think she’s some kind of witch? And why has he gone quiet? Where are Gus and Clem and Pete? In their position, I would have reached out a welcoming hand, not hovered in front of the house in a helicopter. Are they waiting to hear from me? Maggie has warned me off all three of them as part of “Harvey’s gang.”
TWENTY
Too curious to heed warnings, the other day I decided to seek out my old friends separately, and play the bumbling, distracted old fool. At the least I wanted to see them with my own eyes and judge for myself. At best, I hoped to consult the archives of the The Carverville Lighthouse and try to determine whether in fact skeletons had been stolen years ago from the junior college, as Harvey suggested. The newspaper isn’t online. Beverley thinks I’m wasting my time, that it’s obvious Harvey made up the skeleton story on the spur of the moment. But I’m not entirely sure of that. What if they pilfered skeletons years ago as part of a future cover-up strategy?
Starting with Clem, I waited until Maggie had gone to work in the morning and, sending Taz ahead to Beverley
’s garden, I said I had errands to run. Instead of walking on the beach to the Eden Resort, I rode my bike into town and chained it to a pole on Second and Acacia. I could have gone to city hall to see Clem during his office hours—as Harvey said, he’s also Carverville’s part-time mayor—but I knew Maggie would be in the building. So, I preferred seeing him for the first time at the premises of the newspaper, the second-oldest continuously published paper in the West, after the Mountain Messenger in Downieville, California, where Mark Twain briefly cut his teeth, painfully, it’s said.
The offices of The Carverville Lighthouse are a few blocks away from downtown, in a vintage clapboard bungalow, down a one-way alley a hundred yards from Mulligan’s. I walked quickly by the entrance, circled the block, and walked past again in the opposite direction, conscious of being observed by the security cameras.
The day was cold and windy, and as usual I saw no one on the sidewalks. Only a few cars passed. Glancing at the building, I noticed the old ten-foot wooden model lighthouse on the roof looking forlorn, rattling in the wind, held upright by guy wires. Loitering on a corner and pretending to check my cellphone, I waited a few more minutes until Clem drove up. I recognized him right away. Barely five-foot-four, Clem had always been an ornery, vain, high-strung stump of a boy among the towering lumberjack giants of Carverville. His gingery hair is still thick and wavy but going gray now, and he wears thick black-rimmed glasses that hide his small darting blue eyes and the girlish features of his leprechaun face.
Hopping out of his outsized pickup truck, he bustled down the alley with a bundle of papers tucked under one arm and a smartphone clutched in his free hand. He wore a bright yellow reflective vest emblazoned with the words emergency crew. I couldn’t help noticing that, like Beverley’s, his sporty pickup was bright cherry red. Hadn’t Clem wanted to be a professional fireman? No department would hire him—he was too short and too mean to get past the HR interviews. I also couldn’t help wondering what horsepower hid under the hood of that monstrous vehicle, and how many miles per gallon it got. But Clem wasn’t the kind to worry about climate change hoaxes. He had never given a damn about anyone or anything other than himself, except, maybe, his strange friendship with Harvey. Clem was the puppeteer who made Humpty Dumpty dance. I wondered if that was still the case, or if the roles had been reversed.
Staring at his truck, unable to make up my mind, I suddenly knew I’d seen it before—close up. The vanity license plate read GOCLEM76, and now the penny dropped. On my second day in town, before the tree came down on the RV, I’d ridden my bike around and that customized SUV had forced me into a ditch, the driver flipping me off to add insult to injury. I’d meant to report his reckless driving but thought better of it, wanting to avoid the authorities. Irate now, I was about to follow Clem down the alley and give him a piece of my mind, when Maggie’s words came back to me. “Clem is the worst of the pack,” she said. “He’s got little-man syndrome. If you think he was ever a friend of yours, you’d better think again.” So, heeding Maggie’s words, I thought again, shrugged involuntarily, and walked back to my bike, deciding to take a rain check. There would be other ways to find out about the skeleton theft, if such a thing had occurred, and I’d no doubt meet Clem sooner than was healthy for either of us.
Gus and Pete turned out to be a twofer. When I rode up, they were standing in a wide shared driveway shooting the breeze, surrounded by outsized tow trucks and industrial equipment, country music blaring from the open doors of a yawning, greasy garage with four lift bays, all occupied. Tipping back their red billed caps one then the other, as if doing the same comic routine as Harvey and Tom, they didn’t recognize me at first. They probably knew from Harvey about the silly little fold-up bicycle, though, and eventually they put two and two together and got five, to borrow another expression from Beverley. We shook hands and paddled at each other and they seemed sincerely glad to see me, so much so that I began to wonder if Maggie and Beverley weren’t exaggerating when describing their potential for nastiness. If Pete was so bad, how could Sally still be married to him, I found myself wondering. Gus? He’d always been mild mannered, polite by Carverville standards, and respectful of his second-generation Swedish parents and kin, the Gustafson clan.
Looking like a prosperous patriarch from hillbilly heaven, Pete led me in, telling me he now owned the Carverville Garage, where he had worked back in high school, as Harvey had mentioned. Gus Gustafson had set up business next door. Renting out trailers, trucks, mini-dozers, and other earth-moving and tree-trimming equipment, dumpsters, cement mixers, and industrial chippers, Gus also sold and serviced chainsaws, blowers, lawn mowers, weed whackers, quads, dune buggies, and similar useful, noisy, polluting, destructive devices for the garage, garden, forest, and beach. Both men had done well in a small-town way, and both looked remarkably unchanged, like Clem, though they were thicker and graying. As Pete and I took a tour through the garage and into Gus’s store, I spotted half a dozen paying customers—about the most animation I’d experienced in town so far, outside the old diner. In Carverville, cars and machinery and food are the be-all, end-all, after all.
Watching the two of them interact, I remembered wondering if Gus and Pete weren’t cousins or secret half brothers. Pink complexioned, big boned, and burly, they had the same sunstruck, vacuous look in their gray eyes, the same grease in the deep creases on their outsized mitts, the same slow, vaguely Scandinavian rural drawl, and they even wore the same make of blue industrial overalls. On one set, Carverville Garage was picked out in large yellow letters stretched over Pete’s broad back and shoulders, with his name in cursive on his left breast. Similarly, Gus’s outfit said Carverville Equipment Rentals and, on his breast, you could read the name “Gus.” Both also wore small official-looking badges that identified them as first responders, deputized by the county sheriff’s department. Then another penny dropped, and I recalled seeing the overalls on one of them, the driver of the flatbed truck, the evening of the cage incident, but it had been too dark to make a positive ID of who it was. They were part of the problem, not the answer.
What other details about my old “friends” might Beverley demand of an investigator, or Maggie of a budding psychologist? Sadly, I couldn’t identify the twanging country rock on the sound system in the garage. I did notice Pete’s hair. He had a head of thick black hair once upon a time, but, like Harvey, had lost much of it, and what was left contained more salt and slate than pepper. He reeked of cheap aftershave, and the smell brought back to mind his peculiar body odor problem, a torment and a cross to bear through high school. Gus’s blond mane had receded like his pinkish-black gums, which I saw when he smiled at me, but he was tall enough so that most people wouldn’t notice the bald spot and turtle dove coloration. They both still chain-smoked and chewed and spat, like Harvey, and within a few minutes I think we all realized we had less than zero in common, and nothing much to say to one another, a deep past, a shallow present, and no future. But we pretended otherwise and agreed to get together soon for a “high school reunion” at Harvey’s, a pool party in winter, since Harvey now had an indoor-outdoor heated swimming pool and gas-fired barbecue and was living the high life.
“Or we could do some hog hunting from Sam’s ’copter,” Pete said with his roller-coaster diction, his head bobbing in time.
“Sam’s my son,” Gus explained affably. “He’s a pilot, he’s got lots of work doing deliveries to the rigs and taking folks hunting,” he added with evident pride. “Harvey loves it, you would, too.”
“Sounds great,” I said with inexplicable enthusiasm, and immediately regretted it. Pete and Gus smiled approvingly and flapped me on the shoulders again, glad to have me back. Why, they said, I could join the volunteer fire department, and they needed a new man for the Patriot Posse, too, since Casey had left town for good. Did I remember Casey Hallard? No, I said, I did not.
“Posse?” I asked, an afterthought. “I never could ride a horse,” I said, joking, but they didn’t get
the joke. “We’ll work something out,” I added, clapping them both on the shoulders.
What came through during our brief encounter were not Harvey’s sadistic vindictiveness and Clem’s celebrated Napoleonic nastiness, but rather plain old stupidity, ignorance, and dullness covering an abyss of horrors from the past, with others waiting to happen. They were the kind of good old boys who obeyed orders, never asked questions, and deeply believed whatever they did was right and proper.
After a long parlay with an AAA dispatcher, Gus asked, “Which way you headed?” I told him I wanted to take a peek at the old junior college, I was on a roots rediscovery journey, and Maggie’s father had founded the place. They glanced at each other vacuously.
“I never saw the point of going to college,” said Pete defensively.
“Me neither,” said Gus. “I’ll drive you over,” he added cheerfully, explaining that he had to drag away a stalled car down on Highway 12. “I’m going your way.”
Before I could object, he and Pete were lifting the bike onto the back of the tow truck and strapping it down with movers’ belts. I paused, glancing at the belts, not sure where I’d seen them before, then shook my head and let it go. We climbed into the cab. Turning on the truck’s swirling lights, Gus laid scratch as he pulled out. “Got 425 HP under there,” he said, pointing at the hood, “and more torque than you’ve ever felt.”