by David Downie
My head snapped back as he accelerated, and I worried about whiplash. But I had to admire the simplicity and naturalness of Gus’s pleasure. Glancing back through the cloud of black diesel exhaust Gus had produced, I saw Pete smiling broadly, waving. “Heard you rebuilt the McCulloch,” Gus remarked as we tore south on the frontage road, “you be careful, you haven’t been doing much cutting lately I’ll bet, and that old saw is a killer, go right through wood and plastic and bone and metal, too—no safety guards. We turned it away, wouldn’t touch it. Like I said to that colored boy, Maggie’s boy, that saw should be in a museum or a junkyard.”
When Gus laughed he whooped and hiccupped, and suddenly I remembered how I always thought of him as Carverville’s leading Dumbo, not a bad guy, just plain dumb.
The truck’s dispatching radio fizzed and crackled, and Gus smiled and shifted into fourth gear. Thinking of Beverley, I noticed the furry dice and miniature bowling pin dangling from the rearview mirror, and a three- or four-inch plastic Bible lying open with the words “Let Jesus into Your Life” glued to the top of the dashboard. Gus was wearing a shiny gold crucifix on a gold chain around his neck, just peeping out of his undershirt and chest hair. Then I focused on the golden band on his ring finger and, pointing at it, asked whom he’d married.
“Which time?” Gus quipped, “the first or second or third or the fourth time?” He laughed loudly from a deep place in his big, cavernous body. “Married Sheila back in 1981,” he added. “You remember Sheila Svensson? Didn’t last. Anyways, we had two kids, Sam and Jenna, he’s the pilot and she does the checkout at Farmstead Market at the Seaside Mall. Then I married Sue, remember Sue Lamont, the tall gal, stacked, blonde, bad teeth?” I made reassuring noises and let him go on. “We had another one, Gus Jr., she got him and moved away . . .”
By the time Gus pulled over near the driveway to the junior college campus, he’d run through four wives and six children of his own, a catalogue of soap opera names, adding that the latest was only three years old, a boy named Taylor. “His mother is Hannah,” he said, “she’s Annie’s best friend, or she was Annie’s best friend until a couple years ago, so I guess that makes Hannah seventeen years younger than we are.”
“Seventeen?” I asked. “Beverley must be glad to know that,” I remarked. Gus didn’t get it, so I let it go. “Who is Annie anyway?” I added. “I’ve been gone a long time, I don’t know any of these people.”
“She’s Pete’s youngest, Tom’s little sister. Moved up and over the hills after some trouble with her husband, Granger. You heard of Granger yet? He was Sheila’s son by Bill Jones, the varsity football player, so anyways I guess that makes Granger my ex-stepson. Remember that big, old yellow house on the road to Lakeside, just over the county line, in the outskirts of Hazelwood? We used to go hunting up there sometimes, in high school, that’s where Harvey wrecked his trail bike, that old Honda job. Don’t tell me you don’t remember? Little Annie lives in that house we used to go to sometimes for fun, remember? Some of Kitten Caboodle’s gals were up there back then . . .” Gus paused and I saw him blush.
“Is that where we took Clem to get him laid?” I asked. “I thought it was the motel behind Mulligan’s?”
Gus shook his head. “It was the big, old yellow house in Hazelwood. So, Annie hooked up again with someone, runs the Hazelwood Hops & Hog now, but don’t mention her name to Tom or Harvey, they never forgave her, and I don’t blame them.”
“For what?”
“For taking up with that long-haired hippie troublemaker from out of town, and dumping Granger like that, and just being friends with all the wrong people.”
Feeling slightly dizzy, I swung my head a few times to clear it, then said I didn’t really remember much about the yellow house or know the Hazelwood Hops & Hog, but I guessed it was a bar or restaurant. “Microbrewery,” Gus said. “Good stuff. Too bad about the people who go there.”
I shook his thick, rough hand after he unstrapped my bike and lifted it down. “Gotta get you something better to ride.” He grinned, his gums showing. “I have a whole range of off-road vehicles you can buy or lease, might come in handy on the beach up there, if you’re staying at Five Mile with Maddie.”
“We have lots to catch up on,” I said as affably as I could. “I might drop by and rent one of those quads,” I added, “take a ride in the woods, for old times’ sake.”
Gus thought that was a great idea. Hunt some hogs the old-fashioned way, he said.
This time it was my turn to stand in the cloud of diesel exhaust and wave at the receding tow truck. Pushing my bike up the long drive toward the campus, avoiding the pair of jacked-up hot rods that roared by with teenagers at the wheel, I reviewed what Gus had said. When might he have used the McCulloch to know it was so dangerous? And why all the talk about this Annie woman? Also to my surprise, he’d corrected me when I called the school a junior college, saying it was now a community college, as in commies and left wingers, but that was about to change, soon it would be just a plain old vocational school, with training in computer science, drone technology, and accountancy, on the high end, and mechanics, woodworking, and forestry on the other.
The thought of having to bring up a three-year-old at our age filled me with something like dread. I wished Gus well and started to put him out of my mind, when the thought of Annie returned—Annie and the missing young brawler of Mulligan’s. Maggie’s son? Those were yet more dots to join. I might want to try some of that microbrewery’s beer after all.
Compared to what it had looked like back in the 1970s, the college was unrecognizable. It had doubled in size since Professor Simpson’s tenure and, like certain other parts of Carverville, showed periods of clumsy growth or corrosive decline in its glassy postmodern carbuncles and current decrepit infrastructure—pitted parking lots, unfinished traffic islands where the landscaping had dried up and died, beaten earth instead of lawns, a half-built sports complex, and so on. “Third world” is the term that sprang to mind, another new normal.
Asking directions from a handful of hurried students, I eventually found the library and was not surprised to see it closed until further notice. Maggie had told me the librarian had retired and not been replaced due to budget cuts and political choices. The facility was being transformed into a digital learning lab, Taz had noted approvingly. Everything was being scanned and uploaded, and the obsolete paper documents were being transferred to a storage facility somewhere or recycled. Partway through the move, funding had run out. It was a familiar story.
Further inquiries led me to the basement office of the property manager, where I found an older, heavyset man, presumably Jonathan Dewey, the doctor’s brother by the looks of him, seated on a broken-down swivel chair at a gunmetal desk in a low-ceilinged room with fluorescent strip lights. Talking on an old camel-colored landline telephone with a knotted cord hanging from the handset, the man nodded me to a folding chair and when his conversation was finished asked me in a friendly tone what he could do to help me. I offered my hand and, confirming to me that he was Dewey, the elder, he joked, saying he was in no way as distinguished or successful as his younger brother. I told him who I was, how we must have known each other at Carverville High, and how I’d seen his brother recently, and was living with Maggie.
Dewey brightened as he led me upstairs into the sunshine. Standing on the vast, unfinished concrete esplanade with a view over barren hills to the highway and the ocean, he said he had the keys to everything, and we could go to the library if we wanted, but he doubted if we’d find anything of interest, since so much had been removed already.
“It’s the old maps I’m looking for,” I said. “Somehow, way back, I remember seeing a book about local history, with maps of the county from a century or more ago.”
“You may be in luck, then,” he said, opening the door to the library and flipping switches as we progressed into the half-dismantled stacks. “We haven’t got to the local history room yet.” Clearing a spot at a long s
tudy table, he said, “Help yourself, call me when you’re done.” Jonathan gave me his cellphone number and started back out as I pecked it into my disposable phone.
“One other thing,” I said as an afterthought. “Did you ever hear of skeletons being stolen from the science lab here? It would’ve been a few years back, maybe a decade or more.”
Dewey paused and for a moment looked astonishingly like his plumper, shorter brother, the piebald hair, wrinkled brow, and smiling eyes identical. He shook his head. “No skeletons stolen from here,” he remarked. “We have a skeleton staff, if that’s what you mean.” He laughed. “No one else has lasted as long as I have, all the smart people moved out a long time ago. Been here since 1980 and believe me, I would know. Where’d you hear that?”
Shaking my head and looking down at my feet as if puzzled, I said, “I can’t remember. Maybe I read it somewhere? The Lighthouse, for instance?”
Dewey shook his head again. “I’ve read every issue of that rag since the day I could read.” He chuckled. “Plenty of stuff about the weather, who got married or divorced, who sold or bought a house or a boat, or died or gave birth, the hunting and hogs, the deer and raccoons, the fact that it just isn’t true there’s tar on the beach and not a stick of wood in the hills, and no jobs in town, and then of course, there’s all the local advertising for hardware and rental equipment, helicopter trips and whale watching without whales getting in the way, and stuff at the Seaside Mall on sale because no one wants to buy it, plus a survey of the best retirement homes, real estate deals, secondhand baby clothes, you name it, but never anything as exciting as stolen skeletons.”
TWENTY-ONE
As I rode from the campus across Carverville to Beverley’s, I thought about the book of maps I had found in the local history room, published in 1890, guaranteed accurate and based on the land registry. I was genuinely happy my memory wasn’t wrong. I had seen that book forty years ago but remembered it because of the graveyard on Egmont’s property. It turns out the burial grounds corresponded to the area now occupied by the public parking lot, where I had spent ten days in the RV, and the stretch of land bounded by the fallen cypress and the lower parking area at the bottom of Beverley’s property, as far as I could tell. Another old town map of the same kind, from the 1940s, showed the graveyard had been cleared, the current beach access created, with that seventeen-step staircase, and the Beachcomber Motel built. Borrowing Dewey’s smartphone, I got him to take photos of the two maps and email them to me, Taz, Beverley, and Maggie.
So, I was pleased with the research I’d managed to accomplish, the graveyard and skeleton questions no longer hanging over my head, so to speak, and those curious tidbits from Gus about the McCulloch and Annie to keep my mind turning over as I pedaled the undersized bike down an unpaved shortcut to the Old Coast Highway. I was also pleased I’d seen Gus and Pete and defused any potential hostility from that quarter. I decided that, what the hell, I would go hog hunting with them in the helicopter. Maybe I would discover something I might not see otherwise.
Yet it troubled me that I’d made some strategic blunder without realizing it. This feeling persisted and grew over the next few days, following my conversations with Beverley and Maggie. “Harvey’s gangsters” were “trouble” they each said, over and over, in different ways.
When, that same afternoon following my visit to the college, I mentioned to Beverley what Gus had said about Annie falling out with her family, living in Hazelwood and working at the Hops & Hog, and how I might rent a quad or borrow Maggie’s car and drive up there without telling Maggie, of course, Beverley looked me up and down with a gimlet eye as if I’d said something obscene. We were working in the garden toward sunset—I was trimming the escallonia bushes on the south side of her parking lot while she shuffled around me, talking nonstop.
“What do you take me for, JP?” she asked with an indignation that did not seem feigned or jokey, then answered herself before I could open my mouth. “Can you really imagine I would not have betaken myself over yonder to Hazelwood long ago and talked shop with little Annie, the lush with long thighs? She and I weren’t exchanging recipes for cakes and ale, Your Honor. Do you think I wasn’t as curious as you, if not more curious than you, about the tall, dark, mysterious troublemaker who passed through town four years ago and then, poof, disappeared?”
I started to object that when the subject had come up before, she hadn’t seemed to know much about either Annie or the unknown visitor. She cut me off with a sweep of her pudgy hand.
“First, Mr. Hamilton Burger, Annie has been thoroughly debriefed by yours truly and Maggie, who is no mean interrogator, believe me, as you may one day find out. Second, Annie will not talk to you or anyone else about the incident, she is scared witless, and she doesn’t have many wits to spare or to scare, whatever portion she started out with having been properly pickled. She says she never knew the man’s real name or anything about him other than he was good-looking, a companionable bedtime partner, and friendlier and politer than the local charmers who haunt Mulligan’s. In fact, she wondered why John Doe had brought her there at all—he told her to call him by that name if anyone asked. And she especially wondered why he was talking to her so freely in front of the locals, as if to provoke them. She and Mr. Doe did not meet in the sawdust and spills, by the way, they went to Mulligan’s on day two of their brief romance. He was hitching a ride because his car broke down on Highway 12, he said, and she picked him up. They went to Mulligan’s following their nocturnal tryst, if I may describe it in such terms. The gentleman said he had relatives in town and was up to see them. He joked he was busy saving the world, asked if she would like to join him, and, if not, how about a moonlit stroll by the beach in the meantime, up toward the mansion on Five Mile?
“That’s when Granger’s old buddy Sam tapped the stranger on the shoulder and punched him in the nose when he turned around,” Beverley added. “Annie tried to stop the brawl, but when the Tom Cat showed up with the handcuffs it was too late. They said they were taking him to dry out overnight in the county jail and she, Annie, ought to skedaddle and be ashamed of herself, and pack her bags, too, before Granger got back.” Beverley drew breath, pulled out her car keys and dangled them in front of me.
“If you can do better, Hamilton, please borrow my truck and drive on over to that brewery or the old whorehouse, feel free. Before you go, I would add that Sam and everyone else at Mulligan’s denied they’d ever seen anything, and there is no record of any of this on the books at the sheriff’s department, no record of a tow truck or breakdown on Highway 12, either. Maggie found ways of checking, believe me. So, if you were planning to undertake your secret mission without telling Glinda and Alexander Z Great, then, as I just said, feel free, take my pickup, the tank’s full, and I’m sure the GPS tracking devices imbedded all over the truck by the sheriff and his posse are in perfect order. Go in for a lube job, come out with enough spy hardware to thrill a Russian.
“They would also have built those pesky bugs into the quad, if it comes from Gus, and I’ll lay you a bet they planted a few on your little old bicycle there while they were at it, not to mention the RV.” She shook her head, clearly disappointed in me, and rattled her pearls. I started to object, then recalled how Gus had taken the bike from me with great solicitousness when Pete and I toured the garage and shop. “Go on, instead of grumbling, take a look under the fenders and the seat,” she insisted, jabbing a pink-tipped finger at the folding bicycle.
Blushing the cherry red of her pickup as I disengaged two GPS tracking devices with sticky adhesive bases embedded under the seat and front fender, I slipped them into my pocket and muttered something about needing to sharpen the pruning shears and then calling it a day. Slinking off to the shed before she could stop me, and pushing the bike alongside, I stuck the devices to a sawed-off section of two-by-four, walked down the rickety staircase to the beach, and threw the wood into the waves. Afterward, bypassing the motel office, I left the resort
grounds carrying the bike up through the undergrowth to the stump of the cypress. My face was still burning from embarrassment and anger. Beverley was right on all counts. Who was I to come along and compromise their efforts? Kicking sulkily and digging with my heel, I found another bone fragment, wiggled it free from the roots of the tree that had fed on it, and slipped it into the pocket of my windbreaker. One day I’d figure out if it was a human or an animal bone.
What if, I said to myself, confused and flushed, making my way home on my ridiculous little bicycle, what if Beverley and Number Three had somehow been complicit with the authorities early on, and she had been spooked and now wanted out? That might explain a number of things. I started to list them, beginning with the McCulloch and ending with Beverley’s supernatural ability to know exactly what I was doing, thinking, hoping, and planning.
The disconcerting thought persisted as I rode home on the Old Coast Highway, my head swiveling back and forth as I scanned the road ahead and behind for speeding jacked-up SUVs or Clem’s cherry-red fire engine. Out to sea, right about where I’d thrown the two-by-four in the water, a helicopter hovered and circled. Then the pilot swerved away and flew slowly parallel to me over the beach for at least a mile before spinning around and zipping south out of view. He must have spotted me on the highway. Clem or Gus?
Also in the category of troubling discoveries, I noticed after I got home, when I was searching for the keys to the RV, that Maggie carries a handgun in her purse. Why? It’s so out of character. Then again, how well do I know the new Maggie?
Like panic, paranoia is contagious. As a precaution after my encounters with Harvey, Gus, and Pete, and my conversations with Beverley and Maggie, I hid my copy of Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist under the floorboards in the attic, along with the new bone fragment, and that compromising photo of Taz as a child, in front of a wall somewhere south of the border. I also encouraged Taz to make sure his photos and videos of the cage incident were posted anonymously on social media and shared widely on pages already hosting images of the incident.